Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T08:55:21.505Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - The Care Crisis

Covid-19, Labor Feminism, and Democracy

from Part III - Labor, Diversity, and Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2022

Angela B. Cornell
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Mark Barenberg
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Get access

Summary

The just organization of caregiving labor – in the workplace and in the home – is critical to democratic vitality. The Covid-19 pandemic rendered visible the failure of US law and policy to distribute care work fairly and to recognize its value. Lack of support for caregivers has jeopardized social reproduction and deepened gender, race, and class inequalities. The care crisis, however, was not an inevitability. From the New Deal through the close of the twentieth century, labor feminists pursued social supports for care. They advocated along three axes: public entitlements for care in the home, workplace regulation supportive of working caregivers, and the collective organization of paid care workers. The history of this advocacy helps to illuminate the path toward more robust forms of social citizenship.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

All Our Kin. 2020. A Strong Economy Needs Strong Family Child Care: Principles and State Policy Recommendations. New Haven, CT: All Our Kin. http://allourkin.org/sites/default/files/A%20Strong%20Economy%20Needs%20Strong%20Family%20Child%20Care%20-%20All%20Our%20Kin.pdfGoogle Scholar
Alon, Tittan, Doepke, Matthias, Olmstead-Rumsey, Jane, and Tertile, Michele. 2020. “The Impact of Covid-19 on Gender Equality,” in Center for Economic Policy Research, Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers 4: 6285.Google Scholar
Andrew, Alison, Cattan, Sarah, Dias, Monica Costa, Farquharson, Christine, Kraftman, Lucy, Krutikova, Sonya, Phimister, Angus, and Sevilla, Almudena. 2020. “The Gendered Division of Paid and Domestic Work under Lockdown,” in Center for Economic Policy Research, Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers 39: 109138.Google Scholar
Ashar, Sameer M., and Fisk, Catherine L.. 2019. “Democratic Norms and Governance Experimentalism in Worker Centers.” Law and Contemporary Problems 81, 3: 141190.Google Scholar
Barzilay, Arianne Renan. 2012. “Back to the Future: Introducing Constructive Feminism for the Twenty-First Century: A New Paradigm for the Family and Medical Leave Act.” Harvard Law & Policy Review 6, 2: 407436.Google Scholar
Blau, David M. 2001. The Child Care Problem: An Economic Analysis. New York: The Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Blau, Francine D., and Kahn, Lawrence M.. 2017. “The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations.” Journal of Economic Literature 55, 3: 789865.Google Scholar
Boris, Eileen. 2014. “Where’s the Care?” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 11, 3: 4347.Google Scholar
Boris, Eileen, and Klein, Jennifer. 2012. Caring for America: Home Care Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bornstein, Stephanie. 2012. “The Law of Gender Stereotyping and the Work-Family Conflicts of Men.” Hastings Law Journal 63, 5: 12971344.Google Scholar
Boydston, Jeanne. 1990. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Budig, Michelle J., and England, Paula. 2001. “The Wage Penalty for Motherhood.” American Sociological Review 66, 2: 204225.Google Scholar
Carlson, Daniel, Petts, Richard, and Pepin, Joanna. 2020. “US Couples’ Divisions of Housework and Childcare during COVID-19 Pandemic.” SocArXiv Papers. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jy8fnGoogle Scholar
Cobble, Dorothy Sue. 2004. The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Melinda. 2017. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Zone Books.Google Scholar
Cunningham-Parmeter, Keith. 2013. “Men at Work, Fathers at Home: Uncovering the Masculine Face of Caregiver Discrimination.” Columbia Journal of Gender & Law 24, 3: 253301.Google Scholar
Dauber, Michele Landis. 2012. Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dinner, Deborah. 2010. “The Universal Childcare Debate: Rights Mobilization, Social Policy, and the Dynamics of Feminist Activism, 1966–1974.” Law & History Review 28, 3: 577628.Google Scholar
Dinner, Deborah. 2017a. “Beyond ‘Best Practices’: Employment Discrimination Law in the Neoliberal Era.” Indiana Law Journal 92, 3: 10591118.Google Scholar
Dinner, Deborah. 2017b. “Equal by What Measure? The Lost Struggle for Universal State Protective Labor Standards,” in Fineman, Martha Albertson and Fineman, Jonathan W., eds., Vulnerability and the Legal Organization of Work. New York: Routledge: 283–304.Google Scholar
Dinner, Deborah. 2022 (forthcoming). The Sex Equality Dilemma: Work, Family, and Legal Change in Neoliberal America. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dowd, Nancy E. 2008. “Masculinities and Feminist Legal Theory.” Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender & Society 23, 1: 201248.Google Scholar
Eichner, Maxine. 2020. The Free-Market Family: How the Market Crushed the American Dream (and How It Can Be Restored). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
England, Paula, and Folbre, Nancy. 1999. “The Cost of Caring.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 561, 1: 3951.Google Scholar
Fineman, Martha Albertson. 1995. The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fineman, Martha Albertson. 2001. “Contract and Care.” Chicago-Kent Law Review 76, 3: 14031440.Google Scholar
Fineman, Martha Albertson. 2004. The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Fineman, Martha Albertson. 2005. “The Social Foundations of Law.” Emory Law Journal 54, 5: 201237.Google Scholar
Folbre, Nancy, Yoon, Jayoung, Finnoff, Kade, and Fuligni, Allison Side. 2005. “By What Measure? Family Time Devoted to Children in the United States.” Demography 42, 2: 373390.Google Scholar
Folbre, Nancy. 2006. “Measuring Care: Gender, Empowerment, and the Care Economy.” Journal of Human Development 7, 2: 183199.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy, and Gordon, Linda. 1992. “Contract Versus Charity: Why Is There No Social Citizenship in the United States?Socialist Review 22, 3: 4567.Google Scholar
Garcia, Kelli K. 2012. “The Gender Bind: Men as Inauthentic Caregivers.” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 20, 1: 143.Google Scholar
Giddings, Paula. 1984. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Grossman, Joanna L., and Thomas, Gillian L.. 2009. “Making Pregnancy Work: Overcoming the Pregnancy Discrimination Act’s Capacity-Based Model.” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 2, 1: 1550.Google Scholar
Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo, and Rodriguez, Guadalupe. 2017. “Paid Domestic Work, Globalization, and Informality.” Population, Space and Place: 116.Google Scholar
Hacker, Jacob S. 2002. The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Harbach, Meredith J. 2015. “Childcare Market Failure.” Utah Law Review 2015, 3: 659719.Google Scholar
Harrison, Cynthia. 1988. On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–68. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie, and Machung, Anne. 1989. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. New York: Viking Press.Google Scholar
Hunter, Tera W. 1997. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jessen-Howard, Steven, and Workman, Simon. 2020. “Coronavirus Pandemic Could Lead to Permanent Loss of Nearly 4.5 Million Childcare Slots,” Center for American Progress, April 23, 2020. www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/news/2020/04/24/483817/coronavirus-pandemic-lead-permanent-loss-nearly-4-5-million-child-care-slots/Google Scholar
Jones, Jacqueline. 2009. Labors of Love, Labors of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira. 2013. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Elizabeth J., and Runnels, Michael B.. 2013Bringing New Governance Home: The Need for Regulation in the Domestic Workplace.” University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review 81, 4: 899941.Google Scholar
Kessler, Laura T. 2008. “The Politics of Care.” Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender, & Society 23, 2: 169199.Google Scholar
Kessler-Harris, Alice. 2001. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Korpi, Walter. 2010. “Class and Gender Inequalities in Different Types of Welfare States: The Social Citizenship Indicator Program.” International Journal of Social Welfare 19: S14S24.Google Scholar
Kymlikca, Will, and Norman, Wayne. 1994. “Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory.” Ethics 104, 2: 352381.Google Scholar
Lefkovits, Alison. 2018. Strange Bedfellows: Marriage in the Age of Women’s Liberation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Lin, Shirley. 2016. “‘And Ain’t I a Woman?’: Feminism, Immigrant Caregivers, and New Frontiers for Equality.” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 39, 1: 67114.Google Scholar
Maclean, Nancy. 2008. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Malik, Rasheed, Hamm, Katie, Lee, Won F., Davis, Elizabeth E., and Sojourner, Aaron. 2020. “The Coronavirus Will Make Childcare Deserts Worse and Exacerbate Inequality.” Center for American Progress.Google Scholar
Mainardi, Pat. 1970. The Politics of Housework. Boston: New England Free Press.Google Scholar
Marshall, T.H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McClain, Linda C. 2001. “Care as a Public Value: Linking Responsibility, Resources, and Civic Republicanism.” Chicago-Kent Law Review 76, 3: 16731731.Google Scholar
McCluskey, Martha T. 2003. “Efficiency and Social Citizenship: Challenging the Neoliberal Attack on the Welfare State.” Indiana Law Journal 78, 2: 783876.Google Scholar
McGinley, Ann C. 2011. “Work, Caregiving, and Masculinities.” Seattle University Law Review 34, 3 (2011): 703723.Google Scholar
Mettler, Suzanne. 1998. Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Michel, Sonya. 1999. Children’s Interest/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Morgan, Kimberly J. 2001. “A Child of the Sixties: The Great Society, the New Right, and the Politics of Federal Child Care.” Journal of Policy History 13, 2: 215250.Google Scholar
Nadasen, Premilla. 2015. Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Nakano Glenn, Evelyn. 1992. “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, 1: 143.Google Scholar
Nakano Glenn, Evelyn. 2000. “Citizenship and Inequality: Historical and Global Perspectives.” Social Problems 47, 1: 120.Google Scholar
National Academy of Social Insurance. 2019. Designing Universal Family Care: State-Based Social Insurance Programs for Early Childcare and Education, Paid Family and Medical Leave, and Long-Term Services and Supports.Google Scholar
O’Leary, Ann. 2007. “How Family Leave Laws Left Out Low-Income Workers.” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 28, 1: 68.Google Scholar
Palmer, Phyllis. 1995. “Outside the Law: Agricultural and Domestic Workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act.” Journal of Policy History 7, 4: 416440.Google Scholar
Pew Research Center. 2013. On Pay Gap, Millennial Women Near Parity – For Now. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.Google Scholar
Polikoff, Nancy D. 2008. Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law. New York: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Powell, Catherine. 2020. “Color of Covid: The Racial Justice Paradox of Our New Stay-at-Home Economy,” CNN Opinion. www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/opinions/covid-19-people-of-color-labor-market-disparities-powell/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
Rivchin, Julie Yates. 2004. “Building Power among Low-Wage Immigrant Workers: Some Legal Considerations for Organizing Structures and Strategies.” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 28, 3–4: 397.Google Scholar
Robertson, Campbell, and Gebeloff, Robert. 2020. “How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential Workers in America.” The New York Times, April 18, 2020.Google Scholar
Rohac, Dalibor, Kennedy, Liz, and Singh, Vikram. 2018. “Drivers of Authoritarian Populism in the United States.” Center for American Progress.Google Scholar
Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sayer, Liana C., Bianchi, Suzanne M., and Robinson, John P.. 2004. “Are Parents Investing Less in Children? Trends in Mothers’ and Fathers’ Time with Children.” American Journal of Sociology 110, 1: 143.Google Scholar
Schultz, Vicki. 2015. “Taking Sex Discrimination Seriously.” Denver University Law Review 91, 5: 9951119.Google Scholar
Smith, Peggie R. 2000. “Organizing the Unorganizable: Private Paid Household Workers and Approaches to Employee Representation.” North Carolina Law Review 79, 1: 45110.Google Scholar
Smith, Peggie R. 2007. “Aging and Caring in the Home: Regulating Paid Domesticity in the Twenty-First Century.” Iowa Law Review 92, 5: 18351900.Google Scholar
Smith, Peggie R. 2008. “The Publicization of Home-Based Care Work in State Labor Law.” Minnesota Law Review 92, 5: 13901423.Google Scholar
Sohn, Emily. 2020. “When Child Care Centers Close, Parents Scramble to Adapt.” The New York Times, June 10. www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/parenting/virus-day-care-bright-horizons.htmlGoogle Scholar
Siegel, Reva B. 1994. “Home as Work: The First Woman’s Rights Clams Concerning Wives’ Household Labor, 1850-1880.” Yale Law Journal 103, 5: 10731217.Google Scholar
Swinth, Kirsten. 2018. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Turk, Katherine. 2016. Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2008. Women in Labor Force: A Databook. Washington, DC: US Bureau of Labor Statistics. www.bls.gov/cps/wlf-table7-2008.pdfGoogle Scholar
US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2020. Employment Characteristics of Families Survey. Washington, DC: US Bureau of Labor Statistics. www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htmGoogle Scholar
Waldfogel, Jane. 1997. “The Effects of Children on Women’s Wages.” American Sociological Review 62, 2: 209217.Google Scholar
Woloch, Nancy. 2015. A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Joan C. 2008. Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Witt, John Fabian. 2009. The Accidental Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zigler, Edward, Marsland, Katherine, and Lord, Heather. 2009. The Tragedy of Childcare in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, M. K., Litt, J. S., and Bose, C. E.. 2006. “Globalization and Multiple Crises of Care,” in Zimmerman, M. K., Litt, J. S., and Bose, C. E., eds. Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press: 927.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×