Gender,households and sustainability: Disentangling and re-entangling with the help of ‘work’ and ‘care’

Introduction

Sometimes, it is helpful if readers know how a paper began its life. In this case, it began when the authors joined a UK-based research group exploring (un)sustainable behaviours from a social practices perspective. ¹ Whereas many other approaches assume that behaviours are the product of rational, autonomous, individual choices or deeply held values, the social practices perspective locates them in complex nexuses of skills, materials and meanings (Shove et al., 2012). Because of the group’s orientation many of its projects focused on households in developed countries and were ambitious in relation to theory and practice. However, they also tended to assume that households are gender-neutral when it comes to issues around environment and sustainability. ² We found this perplexing given the wealth of social science research demonstrating how gender dynamics help to shape almost everything that takes place in households.

In fact, the assumption that gender has little or nothing to do with environmental and sustainability issues in the richest countries exists across a broad swath of scholarship (MacGregor, 2010b). Much of this is technical or managerial and as a result is weak on many aspects of the social. However, even that which does engage with the social aspects of environment and sustainability tends to focus on such things as race and class rather than gender (Buckingham and Kulkur, 2009; Middlemiss et al., 2019; Webb et al., 2016). For their part, those engaging with gender have often focused on matters such as the construction of knowledge about climate change, the disproportionate impact of climate change on women and the role of women as environmental activists (Agarwal, 2000; Gaard, 2015; Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014; MacGregor, 2006, 2010b). This is important scholarship yet in developed countries gender and environment/sustainability are linked every day in households and this domain requires further exploration.

This background helps to situate our paper. We are motivated by the general belief that progressive transformations are required in relation to gender and environment/sustainability and that these are intertwined (e.g. Gaard, 2017; Sturgeon, 1997). In this paper, we focus on the household as one setting where such transformations are needed. Thus, we ask: How do gender and sustainability intersect in households? What are the normative implications of these intersections? To answer these questions, we disentangle the perspectives of ‘work’ and ‘care’, drawing on feminist and gender scholarship, and extend both in relation to sustainability. To make progress on household (un)sustainability, we focus on two key areas, technologies and consumption in the domestic setting (see below), whilst recognizing interactions and overlaps between these. ³

Before proceeding further, we will define key terms. For our purposes, ‘gender’ refers to the (re)production of masculinities and femininities, including such things as status, identities, norms, roles and relationships. ‘Household’ and ‘home’ are used interchangeably to refer to a single dwelling occupied by one or more people and a social institution. We use ‘environment’ to refer to the physical/material world and related challenges, whereas ‘sustainability’ encompasses these and a wider range of related social, ethical and political concerns. Household sustainability, therefore, involves diverse activities that seek to reduce the environmental impact of what goes on in homes and/or to contribute to sustainability in broader terms from this location. However, because our focus is primarily gender we do not interrogate the complexities of whether particular activities are/are not sustainable.

The following section describes the mainstream sustainable households agenda. We show that contributions tend to ignore gender dynamics, thus treating them as irrelevant, or exploit them to achieve sustainability goals. This raises the challenge of how to replace conservative and regressive interventions with ones which are progressive in relation to gender and sustainability simultaneously – doubly progressive. ⁴ The third section introduces the ‘work’ perspective on gender dynamics in households and the next section extends this in relation to sustainability. Sections that follow do the same for the ‘care’ perspective. In the next section, we situate the discussion of household sustainability, work and care, in the context of the prevailing political economy of social reproduction. This gives us a more critical standpoint from which to view households and helps us to avoid a decontextualized analysis. After disentangling work and care, then we emphasize the importance of equality of work and expansion of care as twin normative agendas. Our conclusion considers areas of tension and overlap between these agendas in order to take up the challenge of how they can be re-entangled. We argue that re-entangling work and care requires holding them in dynamic tension where care should be the context for work, and in this way a doubly progressive approach to household sustainability emerges.

Households and sustainability

Over recent years, ‘households’ have become a key focus for action on environmental and sustainability issues in the richest countries. Explanations for this are many and varied but the story can be traced back to the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) where over 100 heads of states and governments endorsed sustainable development as an objective. Two arguments with implications for the wealthiest countries gained traction at this conference and are worth recalling: (i) sustainability requires changes to consumption and lifestyles in developed countries and (ii) in addition to national and international levels, sustainability requires local level action.

Following UNCED, these arguments were translated into policy and practice in specific ways. Most importantly for our purposes, lifestyles and the local were equated with what individuals do and what goes on in individualized households. This helps to explain not only the emergence of the household sustainability agenda but also the focus on technologies and consumption in the domestic setting. The first includes such things as roof-top solar panels, cavity wall insulation, low-energy light bulbs, air and ground source heat-pumps, biomass boilers and log burners. The second includes the purchase of all the above and other products, particularly food-stuffs, as well as household activities like recycling and composting. The boundary between technologies and consumption is indistinct but the categories are nevertheless widely used and helpful and we deploy them later.

There are many reasons why ‘lifestyles’, ‘local’ and ‘households’ were elided after 1992 but one important overarching influence was the political economic context of neoliberal globalization. As early as the mid-1990s, for example, Hinchliffe (1996) argued that:

[the fetishizing of market forces and consumer sovereignty] … resulted in the ‘local’ being largely equated with the ‘individual’ or the private consumer. Thus, rather than helping the earth beginning in the ‘neighbourhood’ or the ‘community’, it began in the ‘home’. (Hinchliffe, 1996: 56)

Whilst the focus on household sustainability can be critiqued it has nevertheless provided an important focus for research (e.g. Farbotko, 2018; Gibson et al., 2013; Gorman-Murray and Lane, 2011). ⁵ The corpus of valuable work includes intersectional analyses that differentiate ‘responsibility’ to act according to structural inequalities such as class and race (e.g. Middlemiss, 2010). Other research engages with the fact that resource use in households is driven by social and socio-technical relations which are dynamic and difficult to generalize (Burningham, 2017; Burningham and Venn, 2020). Scholarship like this has opened spaces to consider the ‘circumstances enabling families and personal relationships to be part of the solution to “environmental” issues, rather than [being] part of the problem’ (Jamieson, 2016: 336). ⁶

That said, many of the contributions to the household sustainability agenda are also problematic. For example, there is a rich seam of research focusing on new energy technologies and the (re)production of social norms in households (e.g. Naus et al., 2014; Walker et al., 2015). These studies are to be applauded in that they engage with the social dimensions of technology. However, they also tend to rely on generic or universalizing categories like ‘users’, ‘inhabitants’ (Walker et al., 2015: 495–497) and ‘residents’ (Naus et al., 2014: 437). In this way, they largely ignore or obfuscate gender, as well as other intersectional social categories.

Other contributions to the household sustainability agenda are worse in that they actively exploit gender. For example, Sunikka-Blank et al. (2018) advocate designing policies in ways that ‘harness gender’ to achieve household energy objectives. At one point the authors argue that ‘… women seem to be an underused resource in energy policies’ (Sunikka-Blank et al., 2018: 115; also Druckman et al., 2012; Elnakat and Gomez, 2015; Tjørring et al., 2018). Similarly, Brough et al. (2016) are concerned that men avoid green behaviours because products and practices like using cloth bags are coded feminine. Rather than challenge the content of masculine or feminine stereotypes, they suggest ‘masculine affirmation and masculine branding’ (2016: 580) to encourage more men to adopt green behaviours.

Such exploitation of gender is also widespread in business where ‘environmentally friendly’ products often use gender norms instrumentally (Hawkins, 2012). As research on microwaves and shavers shows, products developed for men foreground their technical aspects whilst those targeting women foreground aesthetics (Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993; van Oost, 2003). However, as we show below, whilst prevailing social norms around men, women, masculinity and femininity can be designed into technology, both materially and symbolically (see Faulkner, 2001), this does not necessarily determine how they are used and/or their users.

What impacts do contributions to the household sustainability agenda which ignore or exploit gender have? Reflecting on two environmental campaigns which target women, MacGregor (2010b: 135) begins to identify the problem: ‘Rather than questioning the traditional gender division of labour… [the] campaigns accept and affirm the gendered status quo – and want to put it [to] good green use’.

In general, contributions that exploit gender norms are likely to be conservative at best and regressive at worst in relation gender. For instance, returning to the topic of energy, smart meters may make the distribution of domestic labour more unequal by adding energy management to women’s household practices (e.g. Tjørring et al., 2018). Such conservative and regressive interventions suggest the need for an alternative: a way of approaching household sustainability which is progressive in relation to gender and sustainability simultaneously – doubly progressive. In this context, we move on to explore work and care in the domestic setting.

Gender, households and work

Many of the most important contributions to feminist and gender research which focus on households begin with a deceptively simple intellectual step: the recasting of household tasks as work. This can be traced back to economists writing in the 1930s who argued that households should be understood as sites of productive economic activity (see Beneria, 1999). They made this argument in the light of social and economic changes which put paid and unpaid productive activities ‘… into much closer and obvious comparison with each other’ (Himmelweit, 1995: 6), particularly women cleaning and looking after children outside the home as paid employment. From the 1960s onwards, trailblazing feminist scholar-activists built on this foundation and argued that work is done beyond and within the home.

More so than anything else, gender–household–work scholarship focuses on the distribution of tasks (Doucet, 2015). The key insight, which is reproduced time and again in developed countries around the world, is that women spend more time doing unpaid domestic work than men, although this can be in situations where men and women living together spend the same amount of time in total working (including work which is paid and unpaid, within and beyond the home). That said, the pattern is not fixed. For example, using data from the US covering the period 1965–2010, Bianchi et al. (2012) show that women are spending less time on household tasks (16.2 h/week down from 30 h/week) than they did and more time in paid employment (almost an hour-for-hour trade). Simultaneously, men are spending more time doing household tasks (10 h/week up from 4.9 h/week), particularly outdoor chores, do-it-yourself (DIY) and childcare. ⁷

Describing the distribution of work is valuable but we also need to understand related processes, and a number of scholars have highlighted the role of technology (Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993; Wajcman, 2015). Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1983, see also Jackson, 1992) made a seminal contribution in this area with a history of housework focused on ‘labour saving’ devices. Rather than accept the claims made by manufacturers for much of the post-war period, Cowan interrogated domestic realities and showed that new cleaning technologies can be accompanied by other changes which nullify labour saving benefits. In this case, new technologies were accompanied by new norms around cleanliness which lead to increased frequency of cleaning tasks to meet the higher standards – ‘more work for mother’ (Cowan, 1983).

In addition to norms associated with technology and living, housework (re)reproduces heteronorms (Goldberg, 2013), such as labelling care work feminine and DIY masculine. Cox’s (2013: 582) comparison of different commoditized forms of housework in New Zealand – handyman and housekeeper – illustrates this and its consequences:

[Handymen] were not faced with the worst of the poor pay and conditions that characterise the lot of domestic workers, nor was their labour overlooked by those they worked for as is often the case for those carrying out housework and childcare, be they paid or unpaid.

At the boundaries of the concept of work, it is important also to consider the distinction between work and leisure. One aspect of this is the tendency to define what women do at home as work and what men do as leisure; something that can map onto experiences of the home as spheres of work or leisure respectively (Wajcman, 2015: 118). In general, this is hard to defend. Consequently, recent scholarship defines work more broadly, including things like DIY (see Cox, 2013; Moisio et al., 2013) and ‘digital housekeeping’ (Kennedy et al., 2015). Moreover, class-based analyses of men’s housework in the U.S. offer more nuanced insights: working-class men are likely to experience DIY-related activities as work, whilst for middle-class men it is more often leisure (Moisio et al., 2013). Hence, the doing of household tasks is intimately linked to the doing of identity for all members of a household. And by bringing men and masculinities into the frame of analysis, we enhance our understanding of gender (rather than women) and household activities.

Whilst the distribution of work between men and women is important it is also important to emphasize that family formations are diverse and dynamic (Doucet, 2015; Goldberg, 2013; Gorman-Murray, 2008). This moves us beyond a simplistic, fixed classificatory system of housework as feminine or masculine. Households can be comprised of groups of adults, same sex couples, families with no children, mothers who work and stay-at-home dads, children who never leave or return home after being away, people who ‘sofa surf’ for extended periods and so on. Clearly, the familiar household of a heterosexual couple with two children is only one of many forms. Household formations are also dynamic with such things as employment, parenthood and retirement interacting with who does what in complex ways over time (Goldberg, 2013; Jamieson, 2016).

What, then, is the progressive gender politics of household work? Building on the above, one answer is making visible that which would otherwise be hidden: the unequal division of labour in the home and the gendering of household tasks as feminine or masculine (e.g. Oakley, 1974). Beyond this is equality between women and men in relation to work done in households. However, this can be pursued in different ways and there is disagreement on the detail. For example, wages for housework, equal distribution of all tasks, equal distribution of total hours worked and/or role specialization but where all have viable identities including status and respect. The challenge is all the greater because progress (or lack of it) within the home, and the shape progress takes, is linked to gender (in)equality outside the home, most obviously with regard to paid employment and economic independence (Jackson, 1992: 156; see also Bianchi et al., 2012). Sustainability intersects with work because it will require substantial changes in household activities – different and additional (Farbotko, 2018; Gibson et al., 2013).

Work and sustainability

Conceiving of household tasks as work is one way to introduce gender into household sustainability and several researchers have made progress in this way. In this section, focusing on sustainable technologies and sustainable consumption, we distil some key insights from this work. In doing so, we are guided by Kennedy and Kmec (2018) who argue that there is a need to move beyond descriptive accounts of the gender gap in household environmental behaviours, towards explanations rooted in social context (see also Organo et al., 2013). Most obviously, we seek to go beyond merely observing that household sustainability means more work and this will tend to be done by women – although this is often the case (see, e.g. Carlsson-Kanyama and Lindén, 2007; Dzialo, 2017; Latchmore et al., 2018; Vinyeta et al., 2015).

Given the general association between technology and masculinity, it is not surprising that sustainable technologies in the domestic setting often have significant implications for what men do at home. Strengers and Nicholls (2018), for example, analyse 21st-century ‘smart homes’ in Australia – a term that covers aesthetics and sustainability. Because smart technologies, in the area of energy saving for example, are already masculinized, they argue that installation and use may result in ‘more work for father’ (Strengers and Nicholls, 2018: 78, emphasis original). In doing so, they knowingly rework Cowan’s (1983) ‘more work for mother’. Organo et al. (2013), in another Australian study, focus on the building of vegetable beds and reach a similar conclusion. Such arguments challenge us to engage with the changing distribution of domestic work for women and men associated with sustainability, although, currently, the latter receives limited attention.

Yet the relationship between who does what and the integration of sustainable technologies into homes is complex. Offenberger and Nentwich (2009, 2010) reveal this in relation to wood-based heating systems in Germany – biomass boilers, log burners. These can lead to more work for women or men, or both, for complex reasons. More work falls to women when they are installed in living areas which are feminized spaces. More work falls to men when they are installed in outhouses which are masculinized spaces (see also Jalas and Rinkenen, 2016). In addition, the technologies themselves are coded feminine (stress on aesthetics and home heating with technical competence downplayed) and masculine (stress on functionality and facilities management with technical competence emphasized) in ways that imply and construct users and locations accordingly.

These studies require us to extend our engagement with feminist science and technology studies. A foundational insight in this tradition is that ‘domestic artifacts, like other technologies, are both socially constructed and society shaping’ (Wajcman, 2015: 122). This means that we must understand how sustainability impacts on the dynamic relationship between pre-existing gendered routines/distribution of housework and the way in which gender is designed into technologies and infrastructures, thereby prefiguring users in gendered ways (Cockburn and Ormrod, 1993; Faulkner, 2001; van Oost, 2003; Wajcman, 2015). That said, technologies do not determine use/users. Indeed, the meanings of technologies and corresponding work can be redefined. Thus, understanding the potential of domestic sustainable technologies to disrupt or reproduce gendered divisions of labour is important.

Sustainable consumption is another area where the link between gender and household sustainability has been explored through the concept of work. The conclusion is that sustainable consumption invariably increases ‘ … the unpaid workload for women, as environmental problems are moved to private life, making women more responsible for the “3 Rs” of reducing, reusing and recycling’ (Reed and Mitchell, 2003: 325; also Buckingham and Kulkur, 2009; Dzialo, 2017; Hawkins, 2012; Sandilands, 1993). In relation to sustainable consumption, therefore, and in comparison with sustainable technologies, we do not see household sustainability changing the distribution of domestic work. In fact, the reverse is true; more often than not the existing distribution is reproduced and further embedded.

Why is this the case? Beyond the fact that women continue to be largely responsible for purchasing and day-to-day reproduction of households, meaning that additional work associated with sustainability often falls to them, the link between sustainable consumption and childcare is particularly important. Cairns et al.’s (2013) analysis of Canadian mothers’ efforts to achieve the ideal of the ‘organic child’, for example, emphasizes the additional work and resources required (time, money and emotions). Through ethical food shopping, women who are ‘good’ mothers are responsible for protecting both their child’s body and the planet from harmful pollutants. These ethical food discourses, like campaigns in the UK encouraging new mothers to adopt reusable nappies (Buckingham and Kulkur, 2009), subject women-as-mothers to collective pressures and obligations that are ‘ … more pronounced than those facing just the intensive mother’ (Atkinson, 2014: 564).

This shows that gender scholarship which interprets household tasks as work has much to offer our understanding of household sustainability. It is not, however, unproblematic. Most importantly, the key intellectual move – recasting of household tasks as work – remains contentious. First, it leaves intact capitalist notions that worthwhile human activity only takes place in the paid economy (Tronto, 2013: 86). Second, the underpinning politics of justice engenders a tendency to generate ‘false universalisms’ (Noddings, 1999: 19) regarding the progressive politics of gender and housework. Hooks ([1984] 2015: 105), for example, has critiqued feminist thinking about work (paid and unpaid) as reflecting a white, bourgeois class bias, particularly arguments suggesting women ‘ … need to get outside the home and work — to cease being “just” housewives’ (see also Jackson, 1992). Instead, she argues ([1984] 2015: 105), ‘ … it would be a significant and meaningful gesture of power and resistance for women to learn to value the work they do, whether paid or unpaid’. We therefore echo Himmelweit’s (1995: 2) caution that, although the ‘discovery of “unpaid work”’ was important, ‘ … something also was lost: the ability to give value to the personal and relational aspects of much domestic activity’. This takes us from work to care.

Gender, households and care

A second way that feminist and gender research can contribute to the household sustainability agenda is through the concept of care. Feminist scholarship on care insists on the importance of concrete, everyday engagement with care particularly at the household scale; and in our current times of social and ecological crises, calls to care more for people and planet feel increasingly important. In this section, we pause to reflect on the history and contours of care scholarship in order to highlight key insights, before moving on to explore how these are relevant to household sustainability.

Care has been a focus for feminist scholarship for over 35 years and various branches have grown (see Lynch, 2007 for references to wider literature). All care theorists agree that care is worthy of serious scholarly consideration. Many suggest that it is a prerequisite for survival and a virtue. This is captured in Fisher and Tronto’s (1990: 40) widely cited definition:

 … [care is] everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web.

A key argument in feminist care research is that caring relations emerge in lived, social contexts (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993, 1995, 2013). This is important for several reasons. It begins by making visible the (un)caring relations of all. In the context of feminist politics, this avoids the trap of essentializing the link between women and care within or beyond the home – doing so would contribute to the reproduction of hegemonic femininity in contradistinction to hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2002; Cox, 2013; Pease, 2019). More broadly, however, emphasizing the social shaping of care establishes it as a socially produced phenomenon and something everyone – at least in theory – is capable of (Hultman and Pulé, 2018; Lynch, 2007; Tronto, 1995). Amongst other things, this gives us a way of understanding how neoliberalized care results in thin, impoverished caring relations (Tronto, 2013).

The household is central to care because it is a key site of affective care relations – or their absence (Lynch, 2007). Caring relationships between people co-habiting are the most obvious example. However, the caring relations of the household are much more wide ranging and far reaching. As Jamieson (2016: 339) has emphasized, ‘ … families and informal networks of care are not separated off from wider social worlds as they perform their functions of creating and sustaining ‘individuals’ … ’. Thus human–human care extends in a myriad of ways beyond the boundaries of households into communities, and beyond the boundaries of nation-states where people reside.

In addition to human–human care, scholars have explored affective relations between human and more-than-human life. Research linking people and pets is an example (e.g. Gillespie and Lawson, 2017; Haraway, 2008). This work is important not least because of the way it transgresses the human/more-than-human life boundary and challenges the anthropocentrism which characterizes most explorations of care in households (Plumwood, 2002). Relations across the human and more-than-human life divide are not (or need not be) restricted to pets, however. As Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017: 169–215) exploration of human care for soil through permaculture practices illustrates, such relations can extend to those between people and all aspects of life and living communities.

Beyond human to human and human to more-than-human life relations, are those connecting humans and household technologies and infrastructures. Pols and Moser (2009), for example, focus on health technologies in the Netherlands and compare a robot dog (Aibo) designed to be a fun and playful companion and a robot cat (I-cat) designed to complete tasks on request and offer comfort and service. The authors note a significant difference of ‘affective appeal’ to elderly users with a chronic illness: ‘The robot dog, once embraced, is more affectively motivating and valuable to use than the robot cat. Mrs Jones loves Aibo. I-cat will, at best, be appreciated’ (Pols and Moser, 2009: 169).

Less positively, Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) focuses on household assistant technologies and notes how they can erode care. She highlights the perfunctory way that some people interact with their assistants and more subtly ‘how assistant technologies confirm certain everyday tasks as superfluous compared with the valuation of “autonomous agency”’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011: 93). In ways like these, affective relations can be (un)made as people interact with technologies (see also Martin et al., 2015).

These examples and arguments take us to the progressive potential of care for households and other settings. The expansion of care as a normative agenda – or, to link Tronto and Puig de la Bellacasa, more and better care – has at least three interrelated aspects: make relations which already exist more caring by changing their content, thicken existing caring relations by adding additional dimensions and extend caring relations to who/what is currently neglected. Taken for granted associations between gender and care must also be unsettled to revalorize the care/caring of all (see Hultman and Pulé 2018). This involves paying increased attention to interdependency and collective responsibility (including human to more-than-human life), by all, which in practice requires increased resources: time, money and emotions. Tsing (2012), in seeking ways forward from the perspective of an anthropologist concerned about networks of global capitalism, makes the case for love and care along these lines. Whilst recognizing potential problems and pitfalls she argues that care can mean forming/joining ‘under-the-radar’ alliances and coalitions, through which people act together in solidarity with other people and more-than-human life leading to change.

Care and sustainability

Care offers an alternative way to integrate gender into household sustainability. In this section, we return to the key areas of sustainable technologies and consumption and explore this opportunity. Understanding people and more-than-human others as ‘constantly enmeshed in relationships of care’ (Tronto, 1995: 142) enables a re-reading of household activities and opens spaces for new forms of interventions, particularly by connecting what appear to be individual, private actions with collective actions (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 160).

A starting point is to observe that design matters. Strengers (2014) draws attention to this with a simple but powerful question aimed at designers of smart homes – ‘Are you designing for Resource Man?’ ‘Resource Man’ is the ideal-type rational, autonomous, masculine energy consumer some innovators design for and in doing so help to (re)produce. ⁹ As an alternative Strengers (2014) proposes designing for ‘mess’, ‘slow time’ and diverse humans/non-humans. Building on the discussion of care and technology in the previous section, we would argue that designing for ‘affective appeal’ is another way to expand care within the household (Pols and Moser, 2009).

‘Resource Man’ also tells us something about designing in/out connections between households and what lies beyond their boundaries. Central to this is the difference between self-sufficiency that focuses on individual or household needs and relational cooperative and collective provisioning. Many sustainable ‘smart’ technologies emphasize not just the autonomous individual but also the self-sufficient household – albeit one connected to long supply chains and large technical systems. Thus, caring relations are limited to ‘one’s own’, denying mutual vulnerability and wider connections (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011; Tronto, 2013). Care, however, points towards building relationships beyond as well as within the home. Community owned co-provisioning infrastructure, such as district biomass heating and renewable energy micro-grids, might be examples of more sustainable infrastructural options if we focus on care and relationality (see Murphy and Smith, 2013; Seyfang, 2010).

Beyond design, it is important to focus on how men and women care for and through technologies and infrastructures, or fail to. For example, Cox’s (2013) research in New Zealand shows that for men DIY can be an expression of care and masculinity, and ‘this version of masculinity makes caring for family and friends in certain ways more possible or desirable’ (2013: 587, see also Moisio et al., 2013). Thus, projects completed by men, like building vegetable beds (Organo et al., 2013) and maintaining biomass boilers (Offenberger and Nentwich, 2010), can be part of how household sustainability and masculinity can be remade at the same time.

More publicly, Buckingham (2005) focuses on women in London (UK) using allotments and their style of gardening; they tend to use fewer industrial chemicals, draw on the help of a broader array of people and generate more reciprocal arrangements. Significantly, as their numbers increase, this style can transform allotmenting communities overall. In addition to suggesting how care and caring can be de-feminized – this is how we all garden, not just how women garden – such remaking of allotmenting norms involves inviting others to build social and environmental relations (see O’Shaughnessy and Kennedy, 2010 on ‘relational activism’; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017 on permaculture).

Turning to the linkages between care and sustainable consumption the idea of care as virtuous and relational comes through strongly in research which focuses on mothers. Care, here, involves women caring for children in ways that are good for young people and the planet. An example from a Canadian study is ‘precautionary consumption’ (MacKendrick, 2014) to avoid exposing children to toxins (Cairns et al., 2013). Some women describe such consumption as offering ‘ … a source of identity and pride as a caring mother’ (Cairns et al., 2013: 109). This can be the case even in contexts where domestic activities are distributed inequitably suggesting that progressive gender politics must link work and care in a subtle way.

Beyond relatively familiar possibilities like this lie more radical ways of linking care and sustainable consumption. Dombroski (2016: 632–633) illustrates this in her research into families in Australia practicing nappy-free infant hygiene to reduce the consumption of nappies and associated energy. She begins by asking why women involved in sustainable consumption are not ‘ … understood as environmental activists of everyday practice?’ Then, working with her reinterpretation of nappy-free infant hygiene as everyday environmental and social activism, she goes on to observe how it also has implications for what both men and women do, thus incorporating a progressive gender politics to open up the possibility of de-feminizing care (see also Hultman and Pulé, 2018).

Whilst recognizing the scope for positive links between care and sustainable consumption we must not be naïve. Hawkins (2012) emphasizes this in research on marketing campaigns in Canada which encourage women to buy particular food products and in so doing materially benefit women in developing countries. ¹⁰ Such campaigns build on essentialized understandings of women as carers and show how care and sustainable consumption can be neoliberalized. As Hawkins (2012: 755) points out, in this situation, the environment and sustainability agendas make women responsible in new ways (see also Latchmore et al., 2018; Vinyeta et al., 2015 on indigenous communities in Canada and the United States). Paying attention to the content of careful sustainable consumption helps researchers to avoid simplistic readings of the gender-care-consumption nexus as straightforwardly positive or negative (see Tronto, 1993, 1994, 2013).

Through care, therefore, we arrive at a different and valuable understanding of households with respect to sustainability. However, as with the concept of work, we must be aware of the pitfalls. Most obviously, it matters who cares. It is not possible or desirable to simply ignore questions of equality in favour of relationality. Vigilance is required here not least because of the tendency to naturalize the link between care, women and environment (MacGregor, 2006, 2010b). In fact, there are a multitude of problems, including the potential to coerce care-receivers, the exhaustion of care-givers and the ways it can work with neoliberalism. But, as Tronto (1995) reminds us, by training our attention to the concrete, we can go some way to attenuate these limitations.

Social reproduction, gender and sustainability

So far, we have focused on the internal dynamics of households. More specifically, we have used the concepts of work and care, and the themes of technology and consumption, to understand gender and sustainability in this setting. Households, however, do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are part of a global system of social reproduction and any discussion of gender, households and sustainability that fails to explore this is incomplete. In this section, therefore, we focus on insights that situate households in the prevailing political economy in order to move towards a progressive agenda (in our discussion and conclusion) for gender and sustainability in households.

It has long been observed that capitalism relies on households as much as markets and factories. This is the case because households are sites of consumption, and, more broadly, social reproduction – not least of current and future workers and consumers. In addition, feminists have emphasized that women around the world undertake a disproportionate number of the essential tasks associated with social reproduction and that they are poorly rewarded for doing so – economically and socially. Tasks which commonly fall in the category of care/caring provide the most obvious examples. Indeed, as Harcourt and Bauhardt (2018) stress, it is remarkable how little value is afforded to care.

One of the most important critical responses to this, pioneered by Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici from the 1970s onwards, is to link care and work/labour and in some cases to entirely reframe care as work (see Federici, 2012). Terms like ‘care work’ and the ‘labour of social reproduction’ (Mellor, 2019) are used for this purpose and illustrate the approach. For example, as Luxton argued some years ago, ‘ … women’s work in the home is one of the most important and necessary labour processes of industrial capitalist society’ (Luxton, 1980: 13). Goals derived from this approach include ‘wages for housework’ and/or that the gender division of reproductive labour should be overcome entirely. ¹¹

Today, much pro/feminist and gender scholarship and activism has shifted focus from labour to identity – from the politics of distribution to the politics of recognition (Fraser, 2007) – but political economy still matters. This is particularly evident with neoliberalism where there are two aspects of concern. First, related privatizations and wider economic restructuring benefit some and burden others, and the additional burdens often fall on women because of the care they provide. Thus, the politics of labour still matters even as some scholars and activists shift focus to identity. Second, because neoliberalism promotes individualism and consumerism it is well placed to absorb and profit from the politics of identity. Indeed, the shift in focus has the additional benefit of helping to marginalize labour as a concern. For these reasons, those concerned about gender justice must engage with maldistribution and misrecognition (Fraser, 2007).

Not surprisingly then, whilst it is consistent with neoliberalism to frame sustainability as an issue for households, consumers and the private sphere (Farbotko, 2018; Hinchliffe, 1996), it is problematic in relation to gender. It can involve shifting the costs of capitalism, such as waste management, to a domain where no economic value is placed on household activities as profits accumulate elsewhere (Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2015). When this happens, as MacGregor (2010b: 134) notes, the traditional division of labour means that unfair asymmetries are likely between men and women. But identities are also involved. We have discussed examples above where women as carers and men as non-carers are being constituted and mobilized for profit in the name of sustainability (Brough et al., 2016; Hawkins, 2012).

These observations illustrate that any discussion of gender, households and sustainability must be placed in the context of political economy. This is necessary not only to understand the dynamics which are operating today, and to avoid naïve treatment of concepts like work and care, but also to conceive of plausible alternative political economies. Elements of the latter can be illustrated through two different feminist visions of sustainability that situate the internal dynamics of households in their wider political economy of social reproduction.

One approach to the challenge of linking gender and sustainability is illustrated by MacGregor’s (2010a, 2010b) call for ‘feminist ecological citizenship’:

 … my position [is] that feminist ecological citizenship is a more promising and more radical language for articulating the goals of ecofeminist politics than the language of care … In agreement with feminist moral philosophers (e.g. Tronto 1993), I argue that, in the context of a white male-dominated society that constructs and enforces women’s capacity to care, ecofeminism should not romanticize but politicize this capacity … An ecofeminist approach to citizenship … ought to recognize care as a form of work and a moral orientation that has been feminized and privatized in Western societies and that must be distributed fairly within and between societies if gender equality and sustainability are to be realized. (MacGregor, 2010a: 22, emphasis original)

An alternative vision is provided by Gibson-Graham’s (2011) ‘feminist project of belonging’. Their call for ‘more than human regional development’ is arrived at by developing the moral and political aspects of care geographically. Gibson-Graham (2011: 4) hope to transform capitalism via ‘diverse pathways of becoming in different places and regions’ particularly by building relationships between people and place, humans and non-humans, humans and technologies/infrastructures. ¹² This involves practical activities like local and distributed production and consumption of food and energy, local water management, new currencies and forms of (non-)economic transaction. More broadly, however, it involves an ‘affect of love and an ethic of care’ (Gibson-Graham, 2011: 3). This vision is exciting but they say nothing about (in)equality in relation to labour, even though implementing it will take work, particularly at the household and community levels.

Discussion: disentangling

The Households and Sustainability section showed that action to promote household sustainability often ignores or exploits gender. Such action, therefore, can be conservative or regressive in relation to gender politics. In this section, we clarify this problem and begin to identify an alternative. To do this, we answer the questions we posed at the outset: How do gender and sustainability intersect in households? What are the normative implications of these intersections? This can be understood as a process of disentangling gender and sustainability using the concepts of work and care.

Conclusion: re-entangling

In many ways, this paper has been a process of disentangling. To understand how gender and sustainability intersect in households, we have focused on work and care and have spent much of the time separating these to clarify the contribution each can make. However, we are now at the point where we need to re-entangle them. To do this, we will focus on tensions and overlaps, as well as the political economic context of social reproduction within which households are situated.

Many tensions exist between the agendas of work and care including in relation to household sustainability. ¹³ For example, sustainable household tasks, even when equitably allocated, will not necessarily expand care in desirable ways. Indeed, equitable allocation might reduce care; crudely, if a task done in a caring way is reallocated to someone who is less caring. Similarly, the care perspective emphasizes building relations between people, place, community, more-than-human life and so on, but the progressive gender politics of work is women’s equality with men within the home and in the workplace. These are not aligned in terms of goal and scope, and conflict is possible. ¹⁴ In practice, then, protecting ones ‘own’ family from harmful pollutants through ethical food shopping – even if responsibility is redistributed – need not build collectivities, engender caring relations locally or globally or challenge human-centred ontologies. Instead, this can re-embed notions of autonomous individuals living in autonomous houses, thus delimiting care (see also Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Understanding how these tensions play out across diverse household formations will provide further insights into the pressure points.

There are, however, also many overlaps and points of connection between the progressive agendas of work and care which household sustainability might encompass. These are found where change brings about more equal work and expansion of care. Dombroski (2016) reveals this in her study of parents choosing nappy-free infant hygiene to reduce environmental impact. This illustrates the potential to redistribute childcare and at the same time build relations and collectivities, between men and women (as parents), locally and globally, and with more-than-human worlds (Gibson-Graham, 2011). That said, such change cannot be conceived of merely as individualized choice but more accurately represents the connection between private actions and collective ones through ‘everyday activism’ (Dombroski, 2016). Identifying instances of overlap between the progressive agendas of work and care is only the beginning, however, further challenges include examining the limitations of building collectivities across intersectional social categories with gender such as class, race, national context and more-than-human worlds (Kaijser and Kronsell, 2014).

This leads us to the problem of political economy. As we argued at the outset, the pursuit of sustainability through the household is to a significant extent a neoliberal response to social and environmental challenges (Hinchliffe, 1996). And because inequities of work and recasting of care are features of neoliberalism we should not be surprised that related interventions at best ignore gender dynamics and in many cases are regressive. Thus, progressive change requires connecting everyday activism in households with political economic understanding and restructuring (see Gibson-Graham, 2011). This requires institutionalizing support throughout social and political structures, not least to free up the resources necessary for expanding caring relations (e.g. time, money and emotions) such as reducing the working week (see Schor, 2010). As Tronto (2013: 69; see also Federici, 2012) says, the change required to recalibrate the gendered meaning attached to all of our caring activities is ‘ … so great a change that it can probably be called the next phase of democratic revolution’.

Significantly, although neoliberalism favours households as a social unit (only second to the consumer), the home also has considerable potential as a site for radical change. To appreciate this, we can return to the challenge posed by Hooks ([1984] 2015: 105): to value what we do inside and outside of the home (see also Himmelweit, 1995). While we privilege economic activity outside of the home, then we generate what Tronto (2013) calls ‘free passes’ out of taking seriously our responsibility to care and instead legitimize the commoditization of ‘the dirty work’ of care, often outsourced to women of colour and other minorities (see also Mellor, 2019). Yet the challenge of expanding caring relations to reconcile the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable living calls us all back to the home (and other places), to do more caring.

How then, should we re-entangle work and care to understand gender and sustainability in households? We argue, perhaps unfashionably, against collapsing work into care, care into work or offering new neologisms. On the contrary, we celebrate both debates which have substantial and diverse literatures and different normative goals. The diversity of household formations and possibilities of enacting sustainability militates against any one-size fits all model of work and care. ¹⁵ As an alternative, in relation to household sustainability, we seek to use both together, holding them in dynamic tension. In this way, we want to join – in both the sense of contributing to and linking – both conversations of those exploring what Farbotko (2018; see also Gibson et al., 2013; Gorman-Murray and Lane, 2011) calls ‘domestic environmental labour’ and those elaborating an ethic of care as relevant to gender and sustainability in our homes (e.g. Dombroski, 2016; Plumwood, 2002; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 2013). That said, we believe that care offers the most radical potential. The equitable distribution of household activities is important but it needs to be pursued in a context of care if we are to make progress towards sustainability in households.

Highlights

Interventions to promote household sustainability tend to ignore or exploit gender dynamics to achieve sustainability goals