Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds

11: The Third Shift: Gender and Care Work Outside the Home

251 11 The Third Shift Gender and Care Work Outside the Home Naomi Gerstel One of the important achievements of feminist scholarship over the past several decades has been to document the ways that women, with little recognition, contribute to the welfare of both their own families and a larger community. As a large body of research has shown, women, even employed women, do a disproportionate share of work in the home, including housework and child care (Brines, 1994; Deutsch, 1999; Garey, 1999; Greenstein, 2000; Gupta, 1999; Lennon & Rosenfield, 1994; Press & Townsley, 1998; Walzer, 1998). In this article, I want to examine yet another way in which women have, at least in the past, tended to do more than men. I examine and seek to explain the distribution and meaning of a broad range of caregiving outside the home, whether informally to relatives and friends or more formally to neighbors and strangers served by volunteer groups. Understanding this work is central to the analysis of a number of broad issues. First, explaining differences in caregiving is fundamental to contemporary feminist theories of gender. Second, analyzing caregiving provides a means for understanding transformations in the character of extended families as well as broader communities which have been, for the most part, created and maintained by women. Finally, I will argue that analysis of gender and caregiving helps explain some central dilemmas in contemporary social policy, particularly the efforts of recent administrations to scale down the welfare state. Since the l970s, a central concern of women’s studies and feminist theory has been gender and difference—a concern which, to be sure, has many different meanings and positions. A major strand in this thinking has been to pose gender as a dichotomy—to contrast women and men—and then to revalorize the woman who had been devalued, if seen at all. This valued woman became central to feminist scholarship in a number of fields; in this reading, she (or we) were viewed as having not only a different body but a different voice and way of thinking, a different sense of justice and politics, and a different sense of love and attachment. Those who speak of difference usually describe and then praise it. In this article, however, I do not praise difference but seek to explain it. Increasingly, at the center of the discussion of gender and difference is women’s presumed special ability to nurture and give care. A perception that women do most of the nurturing and caregiving is, of course, neither particularly new nor even par-© 2000 by Human Sciences Press, Inc. Reprinted from Qualitative Sociology Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 467-483. 252 Naomi Gerstel ticularly controversial. Not only is the current discussion of women’s caregiving a reenactment of a similar discussion at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, but also grounds for a curious convergence between feminists and antifeminists. For the notion that women are different, more caring than men, has produced some curious alliances—with some neoconservative women, who defend their distinctively dependent style of life, and some feminists, who acclaim the superiority of women’s relational and moral capacities, joined in a program of moral reform based on a modern cult of true womanhood. But this is all primarily on the level of description, albeit often of a remarkably sophisticated sort. Explanation is quite another thing. Moreover, although explanation , particularly causal explanation, is altogether the dominant mode of approach in the social sciences, I should acknowledge immediately that it is not the primary intent of those disciplines that have carried on much, if not most, of the discussion of gender and difference. As a result, in looking for causal theories I must also acknowledge that to a certain degree I am imposing claims where none exist or are, at best, only implied. Nonetheless, with these caveats in mind, let me move ahead. What I would like to suggest is that, beyond description, the discussion of gender and difference rests on four types of implicit causal explanation. The first of these is perhaps best called essentialist in that it suggests that differences in caregiving and nurturance are bound up with the biological makeup of women and men and are, by consequence, if not exactly invariant, at least deep and tenacious (for reviews, see Fausto-Sterling, 1985; Maccoby, 1998; Udry, Morris, & Kovenock, 1995). Implicitly , essentialist arguments suggest that all women are caregivers more than any men. A second type of...