Abstract
Contemporary discussions about family care in western societies are generally framed in discourses of scarcity, as changing social structures put pressure on how parental care is delivered while paid care workers face time pressures and deficits in workplaces. From a recent study of nursing families in Australia, I focus on the care practices of mothers who are also nurses. I examine how these female nurses understood and managed competing care pressures across work and family boundaries. Rather than experiencing only care scarcity and pressure, these women maintained a consistent sense of the importance of care in both domains, which informed and supported both their family and work practices. The demand to give care in both domains did not necessarily deplete their capacity for care. Rather, they created a set of congruent care ideals and practices at work and home, and maintained the importance and value of caring labour in their daily lives.
Western societies have faced considerable change in the provision of all types of care in the last several decades, particularly in the organization of employment and in the structures of family life. These changes have had implications for family care as adult women’s labour market employment has put pressure on the time adult women have to allocate to family care (Bianchi, 2000; Jacobs and Gerson, 2004; Pocock, 2006). Current explorations and discussions of care are grounded in a sense of deficit and scarcity in western countries, where families are understood to be under time pressure (Craig, 2005, 2007; Craig and Bittman, 2008; Southerton, 2003, 2006) as labour market demands reduce time for family care (Pocock, 2006, 2003; Strazdins et al., 2004). Hochschild (2003a) has identified this movement as creating the potential for the ‘thinning’ out and diminishing of care in the family context.
The provision of caring labour in both private and public domains is complex; while some elements of care can be readily seen and measured, others are not easily identified and challenge conventional market frameworks. Folbre (1995) has suggested that markets may struggle both to produce care and then to value it since it is a ‘type of labour distinct from that which most economists analyse in terms of measurable output per hour’ (1995: 75). She contends: ‘in many personal service jobs (that is caring jobs), both work effort and product/service quality are difficult to monitor’ (1995: 81). Pocock (2009) suggests that paid care workers and receivers of care services find the ‘care’ exchange crucial, but recognizes that care combines activities such as bathing and feeding with other less measurable elements, such as attention and affection. Hochschild argues that the necessity and distinction of caring labour is the requirement to ‘put [in] feeling, acting, thought and time’ (1995: 333). In these analyses, intersecting activities and affective intimate elements are not readily distinguished or measured. Both paid and unpaid care engenders these complexities (Bryson, 2008). All paid care has elements that are beyond activity and measurement: the cuddle a childcare worker gives in the process of changing or dressing a small child intermingles measurable activity and immeasurable affect. Similarly, unpaid care, although located in the private domain, has aspects of concrete productivity relevant to social aims, such as the raising of children. The difficulties in measuring care exactly mean that notions of increasing care scarcity and pressure on care cannot be definitively adjudicated since care cannot be reduced to recorded hours and minutes of activity.
Women contribute most of the paid and unpaid care in western societies. The intersection between women’s physical capacity to reproduce and the socially constituted expectations of women as care-givers creates a universally resonant assumption about women’s particular suitability for care work. As unpaid care work figures in most economies show, women carry primary responsibility for the care of children (Bianchi, 2000; Craig, 2005; Wheelock, 2001). Simultaneously, when states or markets have moved to provide care services, women predominate in those industries. In Australia, sex segregation in paid care work is particularly stark (OECD, 2002), with consequent impacts on women’s wage parity. While the expectations about women’s care cross from the private to the public sphere, so too do the low valuations of care work, with workers in care services being among the lowest-paid workers. Held (2006) suggests the sense that care work is highly feminized has transferred from home to markets and can be seen as responsible for the lesser wages women workers receive and the low value placed on care by markets. While nurses, the subject of the study discussed here, are positioned somewhat differently due to their professional qualifications, expectations of unpaid overtime born of commitment do shape working patterns and tensions. Nursing labour is recognized as highly skilled but ideals about the additional importance of personal attentiveness and care persist (Bartram et al., 2004; Bradley, 2000; Bullock and Morales Waugh, 2004).
In this article, I focus on a group of women workers located at the intersection of these intensifying pressures in care work; female nurses who are also mothers. These workers provide paid care in a market context while offering unpaid care in the familial one; they face care pressures in both domains. I examine their ideas about care in both spheres with a focus on what impact the fact that caring labour is being offered both at home and at work has on their work–family interfaces and experiences. As Wharton and Erickson (1995) have suggested, the literature offers two contradictory views in relation to practices of care that cross the domains of work and family. On one hand, there is strong adherence to the ‘scarcity hypothesis’, where ‘work and family [are] institutions competing for a fixed stock of participants’ energies and commitments’ (1995: 273). According to this hypothesis women doing paid care labour would have less resources to offer care at home. Analyses of care pressures in families as women’s labour is increasingly allocated outside the home are drawing on this idea of scarcity since there is a reduction of available time at home for care. On the other hand, there is the ‘expansion hypothesis’ where ‘participation in one domain can at least potentially facilitate participation in other settings’ (1995: 273). In this context, the care-giving activities of women at home and work might intersect in mutually beneficial ways. In this study, the flexible employment conditions in paid nursing care labour operated to support family care to some extent. But there was another point of intersection and potential expansion, where the importance of care in both domains meant that these nurse mothers experienced some beneficial congruence between their home and work lives.
In this article, I do not examine whether the nurses in this research project experienced greater pressure than other workers in negotiating the family–work interface as this was a qualitative study focusing on drawing out how women felt about the work–family interface in one particular sector. I am interested in contributing to the literature on paid and unpaid caring labour by examining the extent to which ideas about care cross from the workplace to the home and back again, and how women who give care in both domains experience this intersection in caring labour. If the ‘scarcity’ hypothesis applied, the demanding caring labour given in the nursing workplace should reduce the available amount of energy for caring labour in the home. Instead, these nurses appeared to carry their definition of care across these domains which created some intersecting benefits as they negotiated care at home and at work.
Women’s care and time
One of the key elements of the ‘scarcity’ hypothesis is directly linked to the availability of time to commit to care. Defining care is difficult. Folbre (1995) suggests that caring labour is associated with tasks, but also encompasses people’s motive and intent as central. Hochschild says ‘care is a result of many small subtle acts [both] conscious [and] not’ (1995: 333). While care cannot be reduced to time (see Bowlby et al., 2009: 38ff. for a discussion of the complex and expansive nature of care), all definitions of care do encompass activities that are temporally bound. ‘Caring takes place through time and occupies time’ (Bowlby et al., 2009: 53). Relationships of care require time to develop and time spent in delivery. The availability of time for care was a particular concern for participants in the study reported here. In both the domains of home and work, finding and preserving adequate time for care to be given surfaced as a key issue.
Despite changes in maternal labour market employment, expectations of maternal care time are persistent in western societies. Hochschild (2003a: 39) has argued the ‘symbol of “mother” is efficient’ in invoking and condensing multiple meanings of care, generosity and failure, without requiring specification or justification. ‘The image of care is linked with things feminine, private, natural, and well-functioning’ (Hochschild, 1995: 331) and those well-functioning, private, natural, feminine ‘things’ are emblematized in the image of a mother holding or cradling a child. The sense that there is ‘something unchangeable’ (Tronto, 2003: 123), intimate, feminine and personal about caring disadvantages women because they continue to be held responsible, despite other obligations such as employment, and because, as Craig (2007) evocatively notes, there are still only 24 hours in the day.
But much available data suggests women’s direct care time for children in particular has not actually been reduced (Bianchi et al., 2006; Craig, 2007; Sayer, 2005). Bianchi et al. suggest ‘working parents have developed … a complex and fascinating set of strategies … to maximize the time they spend with their children’ (2006: 1). Most particularly, while hours in the labour market for women have increased, they have continued to commit to hands-on mothering. Despite extant fears of scarcity in family care time, there is evidence to suggest that women employed outside the home commit comparable amounts of time to face-to-face care as do women with a primary focus on unpaid care in the home (Bianchi, 2000; Gauthier et al., 2004). These patterns suggest maternal time commitment to the care of children remains important for women, notwithstanding the contemporary temporal pressures in working families.
Hochschild’s (1995) typology of modern care offers a valuable framework to consider the implications of these gendered patterns of care and time use. She suggests the demand for women’s labour market participation and changing forms of family life could produce a new sense of care that better matches contemporary conditions; a ‘thinner, more restrictive notion of human well-being’ (1995: 338) which would limit women’s involvement. The ‘cold-modern model of care’ Hochschild describes would mean all care was institutionally delivered and focused on measurable deliverables, minimizing women’s disadvantage. A reasoned response to current labour market pressures for women might favour this model, but the available evidence suggests this is not the case. Hochschild’s alternate ‘warm-modern model of care … where caring is recognized as important work’ (1995: 341) more aptly describes the current situation. Women continue to commit to personal delivery of care in the home, despite considerable time pressures due to paid work, the limited availability of flexible work conditions (OECD, 2002) and the slow rate of change in both men’s participation at home (Hook, 2006).
This challenge to the scarcity account of care-giving is central to my interests here. These nurse mothers are working and caring across two greedy care institutions, where workloads and care burdens have been identified as intractable. As the requirement for, and provision of maternal care continues, nursing has been recognized as carrying an additional demand for care, beyond the requirement for skilled caring labour. Bolton’s study of gynaecology nurses found they ‘celebrated their capacity to “care too much” as an essential ingredient of professional nursing’ (2000: 586). Bullock and Morales Waugh (2004) found physical and emotional care-giving was demanded from nurses. Many of the pressures nurses face in contemporary health care are related to increased expectations of professional activity while the expectations of care and emotional commitment have not lessened. Yet the potential continuing satisfactions of all forms of caring labour have been less examined. Pocock (2009) describes the pleasure some low-paid care workers express in their jobs: ‘they love[d] … seeing old or disabled people respond to a home visit, seeing them physically and helping them feel less lonely’ (2009: 10). In a study of nurses, Bullock and Morales Waugh found considerable evidence of pressure, stress and the draining effects of emotion work as defined by Hochschild (2003b). But their respondents reported a relatively high level of work–family satisfaction and a strong commitment to care: Despite these costs, it is important to note that caring for others, whether on the job or at home, was a source of great pride and satisfaction for our respondents. As such, their strong identification with the phrase care-giving around the clock should not be interpreted negatively … (Bullock and Morales Waugh, 2004: 777)
The nurses interviewed for this study too challenged to some extent the scarcity hypothesis as they asserted the positive value of caring at work.
Similarly, in examining parenthood, Silva and Pugh have argued that scholarship tends to focus ‘on the extensive economic and psychological costs incurred by parents’ (2010: 605). Such a focus is critical, given the diminishing support in many western countries for the provision of parenting care and the persistence of inadequate frameworks for the management of work–family responsibilities (OECD, 2002). But Silva and Pugh ask whether more attention to the transformative and enabling aspects of parenting is warranted. In particular, they examine the prevalence of the ‘depleting model of care’ (2010: 608) in family studies and argue that, despite clear evidence of the motherhood penalty particularly, there are benefits reported by women as well as deficits, as they devoted themselves to family care.
From this study, there is an opportunity to test the scarcity hypothesis in relation to caring activity by examining women’s experiences of simultaneous care-giving across the domains of family and work. It may be possible to argue, for example, that women continue to provide maternal care despite labour market pressure because they experience benefits and see value in caring labour. And, in the context of paid care workers particularly, it might be that the intersecting practices of care at home and at work, as well as creating high-intensity demand, reinforce and support the practices and provision of care, rather than depleting the stock of available care. I am interested in exploring how female nurse mothers negotiate care practices at home and at work, how they describe care in both domains and whether, in conjunction with experiencing tension and deficit, these carers also find benefit in their intersecting caring practices.
I give a short description of the larger study from which this data is drawn and the methods employed for data collection and analysis. I consider how these nurses frame their mothering and their nursing care work and draw out the care descriptions in both domains. I argue that while these workers do experience pressures and tensions arising from care demands, they value and prioritize caring in both domains. The requirement to commit to care at home and at work does create some sense of scarcity, but it also reflects the congruence of care values across the domains of family and work, giving support to the expansion hypothesis.
Methods
In a 2007–8 study, our research team interviewed 20 couples from Victoria, Australia, where at least one partner was a nurse and there were young children under 12, using a criterion approach to sampling (Patton, 2002). We were interested in how these families negotiated work–care intersections in their daily lives, with particular reference to decisions about employment and commitments to children’s care and activities. We chose semi-structured couple interviews so couples could describe together how they managed. Ethics approval was obtained and couples were recruited by advertising in a nursing magazine, placing posters in several large metropolitan hospitals and using electronic lists. In addition, some participants offered to circulate flyers to colleagues. In all following material, pseudonyms have been used and identifying details changed.
The team conducted a thematic analysis of the data using the NVivo program, with a focus on key categories: caring and work intersections and pressure points, changes to work schedules over time, and the management and allocation of care time between partners. Interview data were then coded in these categories. Transcripts were re-read and validated against categories during the final process of analysis.
The average age of the nurses in this study was 43. The majority were female (N = 18). There were four male nurses in the sample (two who responded to the advertisement and a further two who were partnered with female nurses in the study). Three of the 20 families had both partners working as nurses (although in one family the woman was on maternity leave), with other partners working in diverse fields. In just over half these families, the male worked full time and the female partner worked part time (N = 11). A third of the families had both partners working full time (N = 7) and two of the families had the traditional breadwinner model where the male nurses worked full time and their partners were not currently in the labour market. In interviews, we focused on the intersections of work and care in the nursing profession with attention to everyday schedules, care practices and work experiences. In this article, I draw out the female nurses’ descriptions of caring at work and at home to explore whether the requirement to give care in two domains created a sense of care scarcity for these women workers.
Findings
The struggles these dual-earner families experienced while seeking to provide care and manage care-based employment were considerable, and many reported care pressures as they juggled employment, childcare and child-related activities such as sport that were part of every family week. They were appreciative of the flexibility provided by nursing, which offered options and some autonomy to reorganize schedules according to changing family conditions and needs. In the women’s discussions, there were aspirations for providing high levels of care at home and at work. In particular, women focused on how time could be saved, manufactured and preserved for caring at home and at work. I examine first how care was described in the family sphere and how these women shaped employment around particular ideals of family care. Notwithstanding time pressures and tight schedules to manage work and family obligations, women emphasized the need for free time for care in the family context. In their nursing work, they aimed for time for self-care and patient care. Ironically, one of their strategies for ensuring they could offer extra caring labour at work was not working too much; they were keen to avoid the burn-out that is sometimes associated with caring labour. So time for affect, attention and thoughtfulness in conjunction with the delivery of skilled labour were important at home and at work. Rather than predominantly reflecting the scarcity hypothesis where demands on care in two domains reduced the energy for care in each, the expansion hypothesis also applied. Women described the congruent importance of care at work and home and how they worked to create opportunities for care in both domains.
Managing family care: children come first
There was a strong emphasis on the value of caring for children. These women managed incredibly variable and tight schedules, including children’s activities, with a view to ensuring that children had the best care and the most time to ‘hang around’ with their parents that could be achieved. This emphasis on the value and importance of caring time with children was evident as the nurses reflected both on everyday practices and on the life-cycles of their children. They demonstrated considerable willingness to change shifts, reorganize schedules, spend time apart from partners and respond to children’s needs as they were articulated in the context of family life.
I see the impact it has. I mean like the youngest one in particular he’ll cope for three, four days, but by day five he says, ‘I don’t want to go on the bus. Why can’t you take me?’ And that’s really hard. And then … when they come home in the evening and you see they’re tired because they’ve had to do a whole week on the bus, which has made their days a lot longer. (Claire, part time with two children) And Patrick, my older one, he was really pleased when I told him that I wasn’t going to be working a Thursday afternoon shift anymore, and he said to me ‘You’re going to be home every night of the week.’ I said ‘Yeah.’ He said ‘The Friday night doesn’t matter.’. He wanted me home on a school night. (Laura, full time with two children)
In each of these vignettes, the nurse mothers are attentive to how the children are experiencing time as a central part of the care experience. They respond to suggestions about particular days or types of family activities which are important to the children, acknowledging the longer-term importance of opportunities for relaxed and unstructured care experiences. They often express regret, as did Claire, when it is difficult for the children to manage long hours or changes to care schedules. Sally’s comment below reflects the strong commitment to lots of time at home that was characteristic across the sample (and one of the key perceived benefits of shift work).
With your children, make sure you have time with them. And it’s not just quality, … it’s quantity too. And make sure you’re in your children’s lives. (Sally, full-time nurse with two children)
As reflected in Sally’s comment, both daily decisions about care and more general aspirations for family life were governed by ideas about the importance of ensuring there was time and space for care to occur. Boyd-Reid (2002) has argued that ‘free time’ is often seen as central to family care where not being rushed, hanging out and simply ‘being there’ are vital aspects. This emphasis continued into children’s adolescence.
You know, they always need you for something. You always need to be around for something, support or when they’re in high, secondary school doing their studying, you need to be around to support them and to I guess mentor them, make sure they’re doing their homework and giving the encouragement. (Katherine, full time with two children)
In these aspirations to ‘be around’, these nurses are reflecting a challenge to reduced or instrumental accounts of care-giving which focus only on specific activities or tasks. In the discussions of family life and the way that daily life was organized and scheduled, the basic care activities: food, bathing, clothing, were assumed rather than extensively discussed. The emphasis was on family time and space which were as crucial as the actual activities in caring for children. These accounts echoed Hochschild’s (1995) formulation of the attentiveness and presence required for care. The emphasis in the family schedules on transport, sporting activities and family meals was grounded in the aspirations for creating and protecting time and space for care, as is evident in the quotes above. In a similar way, the pressures and activities of nursing were grounded in a commitment to care for people and be connected to them, as well as to provide skilled labour.
Putting in at work and holding back from work
The discussion of nursing offered by these informants presented two intersecting key themes: the demanding nature of nursing work and the importance of flexibility in employment conditions. These nurses were blunt about the contemporary pressures in nursing work and the strategies they adopted to manage them. These women changed shifts, changed jobs and maintained casual status because they were keen to keep time free for family and to create the best working environment possible. These nurse mothers were able to do this because of high demand in Australia. Mary wryly said: ‘They’re that [sic] short [of workers] that they’ll take anything [from] casuals’ (currently not working, with two children).
This reflects the labour market realities for nursing but reiterates the temporal pressures which shaped employment and women’s decisions about work and family. They recognized nursing as temporally greedy in the sense that it was always possible to give more. Bolton contends that nurses ‘offer additional gestures of caring that are not part of the job description but which they believe are an essential part of their identities as professional carers’ (2000: 581). While these nurses often held themselves back from fuller engagement in nursing employment – maintaining casual employment status for family reasons – they strongly asserted the value of care and intimacy and time in nursing.
I know nurses drive a lot of other people insane with their talk about nursing and the language is gobbledy-gook and you know, it’s such an extraordinary experience and so intimate in so many ways. (Helen, full time with two children) So nursing is not a job that is easy physically as well as from a mental perspective. It is draining in so many ways. And in administration you have got the responsibility of looking after your staff, looking after patients and what nursing is in itself. It is caring for people and that is very, very draining.… But if you look at what makes up a nurse though, most nurses don’t switch off. That is why they became a nurse …. because they like to care for people, and if you don’t like to care for people you shouldn’t have become a nurse. (Eliza, full time with one child) I think nursing is a very valuable social service and I think that when I look after patients … I do quite a good job. And I get quite a lot of satisfaction out of that which is just as well because as in nursing you don’t get any other satisfaction.… It’s very under rated and nobody respects it. (Miranda, part time with two children)
Each of these nurses considered that caring was central to their nursing. Maintaining this commitment in contemporary working conditions was sometimes really difficult.
Nursing is so critically short of people and I work in a critical care area where we just can’t have anybody. It is very hard to get the people with the skills we need to work with us. That’s why the pressure is on and especially now the pressure is on: if there [are] no staff you just feel as management you should be the one that’s contributing a little bit more. But that takes its toll I think eventually. (Jocelyn, part time with three children)
As Jocelyn makes clear, the pressure to give more, to be responsible cannot be lightly carried and does have considerable costs. Bryson says: paid care work … highlights the general difficulty of fitting the more ‘natural’ temporal rhythms that caring activities often require into the rigid imperatives of clock time, that value ‘efficiency’ and ‘time management’ above the intangible development of human relationships and require workers to ‘switch off’ as soon as their shift is over. (2007: 70)
These nurses clearly did not ‘switch off’. The open-ended ‘little bit more’ that Jocelyn describes is understood as part of the suite of activities (administration, staff care, patient needs) that make up nursing and, as Eliza says, is an integral part of what ‘nursing is’.
Intersecting practices and ideals of care
In the above analyses of family life and nursing work, responsiveness, commitment and time were identified as part of the caring landscape at home and at work. Here, I consider these intersecting practices of care across two domains and examine how best to characterize the care ideals of these nurse mothers. I ask whether an emphasis on the potentially deleterious imperative to care across two domains (the scarcity hypothesis) best illuminates the data or whether the consistency of care ideals across domains offer some benefit to these nurses as they manage family–work schedules and demands. In the following two vignettes recounted by Miranda, the doubled burdens of expectations of mothering care and nursing care are evident.
[On] Several occasions over the years … I’ve come home and Sebastian goes ‘I’ve had a great day, they’ve done this, they’ve done that.’ And I’ll look and them and I’ll think they’ve got a fever and I’ll feel them and I’ll [say] ‘Sebastian, they’re really sick and their temperature is through the roof.’ … I’ll whip … them off to the doctor then and they’ve got a really bad ear infection or they’ve got really bad tonsillitis. I [say] ‘Didn’t you notice they were sick?’ No they weren’t sick but as soon as they see me that’s it, their defences are down, it’s true. (Miranda, part time with two children) One time … Maisy was really sick, she was about 15 months.… I rang up and said ‘I can’t come to work’ and my manager said ‘You have to come to work.’ … I had to take her to the doctor and then I think I called your mum and she came over at three o’clock or something so I went to work from three-thirty or something instead of one o’clock and I got to work and I just thought ‘I’m never, ever doing this again.’ I felt so bad, Maisy was really sick, she had to have a horrible procedure at the doctors, she was crying and I thought ‘No, I’m not going to do this again.’ I fear people will think … I’m unreliable [but] too bad. (Miranda, part time with two children)
Miranda’s role as a carer with skills creates pressures and stresses in the workplace and at home that are difficult to reconcile. And these are responsibilities that fall heavily on her shoulders and are not readily shared with fathers or grandparents or colleague; when her children see her, their ‘defences are down’. When her manager calls, the demand –‘You have to come to work’ – is compelling despite responsibilities at home. Martha too expressed the weight of this double burden, even as she acknowledges support at work for her intersecting caring roles.
People rely on me [and] it’s difficult to detach yourself from that.… But I’m lucky because if I had to, say if Carrie has something on very important and say she had to be somewhere at eleven o’clock … I can do it and I just let my manager know.… My manager is really good. (Martha, full time with two children)
Decisions about managing these competing domains were often painful as Grace reflected when talking about schooling choices and the financial constraints of part-time work: You’re kind of damned if you do and if you don’t. Either I work part time and get to be mum to my kids or somebody else brings my kids up and I work full time … it is very difficult. You kind of do the best you can. (Grace, part-time with two children).
Yet, many of these nurses were prepared to bear these intersecting burdens, because there were clear satisfactions in both domains that could not readily be disentangled.
I mean I love my job anyway, and other than teaching nursing, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do. But it’s a definite benefit that … if you’re working part time, you can request shifts up this end of the week and shifts up that end of the week and actually have a full week or two weeks off in the middle. (Amanda, full time with two children)
Amanda’s pragmatic linking of the love of her job and the way it facilities free time for family care are important. As her comment showed, the commitment in one domain – her love for nursing – could not readily be distinguished from the way it supported her ability to gain space and time for her family commitments. Similarly Helen, who valued the intimacy of nursing, had been able to share shifts with her nurse husband Brian; this had allowed them both time for employment and time for family care. Susie considered she was ‘lucky’ to have two set days in the demanding special care nursery as she could then combine both sets of responsibilities. Laura said ‘I’m a better mum if I’m not with [my children] all the time’, linking her family care-giving with her work situation.
In reviewing the fluid, responsive and adaptive ways that these nursing workers managed family and labour market conditions, ideals of care defined their decisions about work and family. In both domains, the centrality of care was evident: giving care at work as part of nursing, keeping time free for care at home, considering how best to manage employment and family schedules so that care could be given. Held argues that care must be valued outside the market, and maintained against commoditization, as we must ‘recognize the intrinsic and not merely instrumental value of an activity’ (2006: 109). The data here indicates these nurses recognized both the intrinsic and the instrumental value of care, as they combined a commitment to care activities (skilled nursing and feeding and transporting children, for example) with a commitment to the more immeasurable aspects of care too: attentiveness, responsiveness and the availability of free, unstructured time.
Scarcity or expansion? Clashing care needs and intersecting practices
In examining the family–work experiences of these nurse mothers as they faced insistent demands to give care at home and in the workplace, the burdens of care should not be understated. Market-based care provision often puts care workers in an impossible situation, since care is being required in two quite different and potentially incompatible ways, through both measurable activities and intangibles such as affection and intimacy (Folbre, 1995). Similarly, at home, while maternal affection is often assumed, the care-giving activities of feeding, changing, cleaning, and comforting are equally important and productive. In both domains, these women rejected the ‘cold-modern model of care’ (Hochschild, 1995), where care-giving is undertaken with a primary emphasis on efficiency. They valued attentiveness and receptivity as a crucial part of care-giving and worked hard to be able to maintain their ideals and practices of care in both locations.
Huppatz (2009) cautions that we must recognize the restrictions and limits on how women can deploy and gain advantage through care-giving when we consider the value of care and its potential as feminine capital. But rather than seeing these women as simply caught by demanding patterns of family care responsibilities while working in equally demanding workplaces, leading to care deficits in both (the scarcity hypothesis), I suggest that the intersecting structures and practices of nursing and family life shown here offer some support for the expansion hypothesis too. The ability to intermingle family and paid employment, where ideals about what was important in both domains were congruent, seemed to provide satisfaction to these nurses as they managed family and work in difficult conditions. Despite the low value accorded to care – both paid and unpaid – these workers maintained powerful cross-sectional commitments to open and responsive ideals of care; they did not ‘thin’ out the value of care. They created intersecting family and work patterns or structures that allowed them to feel satisfied about the care they could offer in both domains.
Conclusion
As maternal employment commitment has increased in the last decades of the 20th century (Bianchi, 2000), women have been caught in intractable care-giving binds, as Hochschild (1995) has observed. Expectations of mothering presence and care have not diminished (Hays, 1996) and, in care work particularly, intensification has meant that expectations of increased productivity have conflicted with persisting assumptions about the integral elements of affect and presence. As Bryson argues, drives for productivity in paid care work can have ‘dehumanising effects … [that don’t focus on] the satisfaction of human need or the expression of creativity’ (2007: 134). These nurses are operating across two institutions that are greedily demanding of care and there are no signs these intensifying pressures are on the wane.
But, from the findings in this study, I suggest these nurses practised a strong commitment to care as they made family and employment decisions. The living out of these care binds did not result in the downward pressure on the value of care (see Folbre, 2001: xiv–xv) in their lives or the adoption of models that reduced or devalued care (Hochschild, 1995). They understood care as requiring activities and tasks and as requiring presence, attentiveness and receptivity. Necessary activity/outcome based measures at home (in terms of schedules and children’s activities) and at work were managed without ceding the other, more relational, intimate and affective aspects of care. While they clearly faced time pressures, this did not necessarily mean care scarcity. They appeared to draw on ideas of care that crossed the domains of work and family and that expanded in relation to the conditions they faced. The intersections of care demands in the unpaid domain of the family and in the paid domain of employment were not necessarily deleterious for these women, which challenges the care scarcity hypothesis. These women valued their care-giving across the domains of work and home, rather than feeling that their care capacity was reduced, and they did not ‘thin’ out or lessen their ideas about what care was in response to temporal pressures at home and at work. They valued their abilities and opportunities to respond to changing and fluid care needs in the family and employment context, and they continued to give time and importance to care. In this way, they maintained and practised an expansive view of care, where the intersections of giving care in both paid and unpaid domains offered benefits.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements and funding
Sincere thanks to the couples who participated in this study. My thanks to the School of Social Sciences and ACREW at Monash University, who provided internal funding for this project. Associate Professor Jo Lindsay, Associate Professor Anne Bardoel and Dr Jenny Advocat conducted the original study documented here; my thanks to all. Special thanks to Jenny Advocat who conducted the interviews and Jo Lindsay who provided helpful comments on drafts of this article.