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Introduction: When Care Is No Longer “at Home”
- NYU Press
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>> 1 Introduction When Care Is No Longer “at Home” Let’s face it: care no longer seems to be “at home,” neither literally nor figuratively . It used to seem so simple. Politics was something that happened in public, care was something that happened in private. Many societies followed one or another form of this public/private divide. Aristotle famously distinguished polis and oikos (household) at the beginning of the Politics. The nineteenth-century American ideology of separate spheres gendered the public as masculine and the private as feminine. In this separation, nonpolitical concerns, including sentiment and love, became attached to the private. “Home is where the heart is,” pronounce needlepoint embroideries. Home is a “haven in a heartless world,” intoned the psychologist Christopher Lasch (1995). But this view of home as a place of comfort and care, marked off from politics, is a myth. While some (most?) homes do provide their residents with adequate, good, and even excellent care, not all homes are comfortable and caring. When the poet Robert Frost (1969) defined home as “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” he was 2 > 3 an astonishing rate that they would never have to face the fact that they were taking out mortgages far beyond their means to pay. By the time the mortgage payments became due, their mortgage brokers had told them, they would have sold their house for still more money and paid off this mortgage with the proceeds, with enough left over for another down payment . Fueled by the promise of easy money, encouraged by shady mortgage dealers and reckless banks, watching television series such as Flip This House, millions of people were caught in the hope that their houses would become a way to break into another economic status. People began to think of where they lived not as their home, but as their most clever investment . Everyone, it seemed, understood that they would never get rich working for a living. But now, for those lucky enough to begin to expand their assets within the bubble, the roof over their heads became a resource to exploit. Until, of course, the roofs all came crashing down. Humans have a nostalgic attachment to their homes, “where,” as Frost put it, “when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” What does it mean that people ceased to think of their homes this way and began to think of them as investments? What convinced people to stop thinking of their homes as a place of safety and comfort, but to view them with an eye toward a calculated profit? Traditionally, as social scientists have explored, home is associated with warmth, a sense of comfort, a sense of being in the place where one can be oneself, and where one can regenerate one’s energies (Windsong 2010). Now, a house was no longer a home but an investment. To make this switch, people had to start to think differently about themselves. One study of British citizens explored this point directly: cut out of the financial bonanza, people began to realize, they would no longer be able to live a good life simply by working for a living, or making a commitment to an occupation and developing a skill (Bone and O’Reilly 2010). Now one also needed to be a savvy investor, to play the market just right, and to expect that someone else would come along thinking the same way as you, but with less money, who would also be willing to invest. As “every man his own investor” came to dominate the economic landscape, nostalgic ties evaporated as people began to think of their homes as places for speculation. For those excluded, or too timid, to take a chance on the open market and change homes, their homes became a source of a different kind of cash flow through low-interest “home improvement” loans, which banks freely offered and which individuals took and used to pay for everything from capital investments to groceries . Consumer debt outpaced consumer savings. One way or another, 4 > 5 and work patterns of American families have changed dramatically. Parents eager to raise their children well find themselves caught in a “timebind ” (Hochschild 1989, 1997), and they use money and things to try to make up for this lost time. Parents now report that they spend more time with their children, but that time is literally spent engaging in activities that are...