Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency, and: Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics, and: On Feminist Ethics and Politics (review)

Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency by Eva Feder Kittay. New York: Routledge, 1998, 238 pp., $70.00 hardcover, $19.99 paper.

Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics edited by Margaret Urban Walker. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999, 287 pp., $26.95 hardcover, $18.95 paper.

On Feminist Ethics and Politics edited by Claudia Card. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999, 365 pp., $45.00 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

Love's Labor is a wonderful book: a multifaceted philosophical reflection on the relations between women's work as primary care-takers of the most vulnerable among us and women's continued social, political, and economic inequality. Eva Feder Kittay persuasively argues that feminists need to rethink basic assumptions of mainstream moral and political philosophy from a critical perspective that acknowledges the inevitability of dependency: in childhood, sickness, old age, and temporary or permanent disability. Such a perspective makes clear the fundamental value of the work of caring and the need for the rest of society to support care-givers, as well as those in need of care, if we are ever to achieve genuine social equality:

The dependency critique [of equality] is a feminist critique of equality that asserts: A conception of society viewed as an association of equals masks inevitable dependencies, those of infancy and childhood, old age, illness and disability. While we are dependent, we are not well-positioned to enter a competition for the goods of social cooperation on equal terms. And those who care for dependents, who must put their own interests aside to care for one who is entirely vulnerable to their actions, enter the competition for social goods with a handicap. Viewed from the perspective of the dependency critique we can say: Of course women have not achieved equality on men's side of the sexual divide [in the public world of paid work and politics] for how could women abandon those they leave behind on that side of the divide? Their children and their elderly parents, their ill spouse or friend? (xi)

Kittay's essays are written in a variety of voices, from the familiar cool tones of the analytical philosopher dissecting arguments, to tender autobiographical reflections on her life with her profoundly handicapped daughter, Sesha. This stylistic decision goes against the grain of mainstream philosophy, and in a manner consonant with Kittay's project. The reader is vividly reminded that rarified debates in feminist theorizing must be accountable to the concrete realities of diverse women's lives. Again, Kittay boldly moves across the territories of policy analysis, social philosophy, and ethics, the better to focus her multidimensional vision.

The chapters of part one establish the moral significance of dependency and its care, deploying insights from works in feminist care ethics. Part two offers a careful analysis of liberal egalitarianism, exemplified by the influential work of John Rawls, and argues that the norms and values that underlie the theory and practices of liberal democracy exclude concerns of dependency in ways that crucially mar the theory. Part three is a stimulating assortment of chapters. It includes an insightful close-reading of recent policies affecting the work of care-givers in the U.S.--the personal narrative already mentioned--and a response to Sara Ruddick's work on maternal thinking from the perspective of Kittay's life with Sesha and her long-term care-giver, Peggy.

One of the many merits of this work is that, throughout, Kittay is scrupulously attentive to the differences between women, particularly the risk that some women may be liberated from the negative aspects of care-giving work at the expense of other, less privileged women. In her autobiographical section, Kittay is clear about her deep ambivalence about employing another woman, Peggy, who is white and working class, to give temporary...