Why Care?

Why care?

This article explores a word that has become ubiquitous in public discourse since the Covid19 pandemic but has long been central in feminist theorising about ethics, the economy, and social policy. The stresses on families imposed by the pandemic made visible a key feminist insight: that care is not simply a social virtue, or habit of good people. It became glaringly obvious during the pandemic that the tasks and responsibilities associated with care underpin the economy and shape the relationship between paid work, private relationships and social life. Strategies such as lockdowns exposed the extent to which parents are dependent on paid childcare; the disproportionate impact of illness on people in care institutions revealed the conditions under which care is provided and highlighted the precarious labour relations in the health sector. The defining feature of public discourse during the pandemic was the attention to the ‘crisis of care’, whether that was articulated as support for frontline workers in the health system (‘clapping for carers’) or various strategies by which people showed solidarity for neighbours (such as shopping for people who were vulnerable). New research is confirming that the increase in care work during pandemic, in part because schools were closed, but also of decades of declining investment in publicly provided services, has disproportionately been borne by women (Kabeer, Razavi and Rodgers 2021). Arguments for increased investment in public health infrastructure as well as for publicly funded supports (such a universal income guarantees) gained political traction in many parts of the world. It seems an apposite time – one in which there is a crisis of care – to explore what care means in the context of a world both dependent on care and uncertain about how to provide and distribute care meaningfully.

Care does not feature in Raymond Williams’ work (Williams 1975), nor in the Keywords Project (a website dedicated to expanding Williams’ project), nor in the two volumes of South African keywords (Boonzaier and Sharp 1998, Shepherd and Robins 2008). Perhaps this is unsurprising. Across all the Keywords projects attention to ideologies of sex and gender was a latecomer. Yet, in many respects care is the epitome of a keyword as Raymond Williams defined it: a term that is socially prominent and has both technical and everyday meanings. As Williams noted, meanings are embedded in social and historical conditions and care as a concept is especially malleable and quintessentially cultural. Where care is located, when and how care is conducted and by whom are shaped by cultural notions of place, time and gender. Indeed, we might even pose the fundamental question: whose life matters in the assignment of care? How care is defined and valued finds its expression in legal and judicial systems, in policy programmes and in the infrastructure of the state. This article aims to outline these various meanings and to show the ways in which contestations between meanings signal profound differences in political and cultural orientations. In the spirit of Williams, the article also flags terms that work with or in opposition to care. Thus, ‘care’ acts as a pivotal word that makes visible a range of assumptions, actions and consequences in social and cultural life.

Defining care

Care is a capacious and polysemic term. It denotes a range of activities and dispositions which signal ethical commitments, everyday tasks (labour, both paid and unpaid), personal responsibilities as well as practical interventions in public and social policy. The Care Manifesto, a document developed by a feminist collective in the United Kingdom at the height of the Covid19 pandemic, defines care in very broad terms (Care Collective 2020). Care, it says, is ‘our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive – along with the planet itself’ (Care Collective 2020:6). This is an all-encompassing approach and a clarion call to centre care in all decision-making.

Care might be part of the common good, but the burdens are everywhere distributed disproportionately and on the basis of patriarchal assumptions. It is a truism to point out that care is gendered...