Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work

Chapter 1- Conceptualizing Care

9 Chapter 1 Conceptualizing Care Supreme court justice potter stewart famously said that although he could not provide a clear definition of pornography, “I know it when I see it.”1 In many ways, the same could be said of “care work.” The term has become something of a buzzword among scholars and advocates, and it is often used in ways that assume a shared implicit understanding of what care is. However, as with pornography, when it comes to specifying which particular jobs or particular workers should be included as care, there are as many definitions as there are scholars. In an undergraduate textbook on care, Francesca Cancian and Stacey Oliker define the concept this way: “feelings of affection and responsibility combined with actions that provide responsively for an individual’s personal needs or well-being, in a face-to-face relationship.”2 This definition exemplifies what I call the “nurturant care perspective,” and variations on this characterization of care can be found increasingly throughout the literature.3 When applied to paid care, a nurturance definition includes nurses, doctors, teachers, child-care workers, social workers, psychotherapists, and personal care attendants. These occupations demand intensive relational work that is geared toward improving the personal well-being of others. Examining these workers as a group whose jobs share key characteristics has led to important theoretical insights and empirical findings. The chapters that follow build on this emergent body of scholarship to examine the intertwining histories of nurturant care occupations, the shifting and contradictory construction of relationality in these jobs, and the ways nurturance has intersected with gender, racial-ethnic, and class inequalities. I also include some workers not usually considered care workers by those who define care based on the relational content of the job: housecleaners, school cafeteria workers, kitchen workers in nursing homes, hospital laundry 10 making care count workers, and building cleaners. I devote a chapter to domestic service, which in its early twentieth-century incarnation may have included some nurturant care roles along with many hours of scrubbing floors, doing laundry, and other tasks that require more physical labor and less direct relationship with others. In this chapter I explore the theoretical foundations of nurturant care as a concept and explain why I do not limit my analysis to these relational roles.4 While nurturant care theory illuminates many important pieces of the care-inequalities puzzle, it obscures others. In particular, an approach to care work that focuses exclusively on relationality does not provide a clear picture of critical racial-ethnic and class hierarchies. I use the concept of nurturant care and look beyond it to more fully understand the historical development of the occupational structure of paid care. I draw on an earlier feminist conceptualization of women’s intimate labors—the notion of reproductive labor—to describe some of the antecedents of theoretical ideas about care, as well as to reveal some of the limitations of a nurturance perspective. Reproductive Labor: Making Women’s Work Visible The development of the concept of reproductive labor was part of a movement to challenge the invisibility of women’s unpaid labor in the home. The bifurcation of activities into separate spheres of home and work dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when large numbers of men left family farms for factories, and women in many families took primary charge of the substantial labor of maintaining a home. While a gendered division of labor has a long history in the United States, in an agricultural economy almost all work took place in and around the home—from planting and harvesting crops to tending fires for heat and cooking to sewing and laundering clothes. The boundaries between work and family were not clearly defined in this environment, and so neither gender could lay exclusive claim to one or the other. With industrialization, the newly organized gendered division of labor became the basis of a gendered definition of work: what men did in the market for pay was work, and what women did in the home for free was housework or domestic work.5 The ideology of separate spheres, a private one inhabited by women and a public one inhabited by men, became a central organizing idea of social life and of work in the United States. The clear ideological demarcation between private female domesticity and public male work did not always reflect people’s lived realities. Throughout the nineteenth century (and well into...