Women still provide the bulk of care, both at home and in the low paid care sector. - Georg Wendt/DPA/PA Images
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The West is facing a crunch point. Inequality and low wages, fertility rates below population replacement levels, increasing health problems related to daily stress, inadequate provision of child care and elderly care, a stubborn gender pay gap, and a slowdown in economic growth.
All these problems have a common cause that economists have so far failed to grasp: the crisis in care. Care is that concern which distinguishes us from robots. It’s what leads us to make decisions that otherwise look irrational. And, frustratingly for researchers, it’s really tricky to capture.
But what goes on in the public sphere – that pay gap, that growth slowdown – cannot be understood without first understanding care. Which means we can’t understand what goes on in the public sphere until we understand life at home.
A short history of care
For centuries the household and the workplace were often one and the same thing, blurring the boundaries between production and reproduction. With the Industrial Revolution, ‘work’ shifted out of the home and into the factory. New industries and new technologies favoured a combination of brute strength and capital – as famously depicted in the murals of artists like Benton. The Male Breadwinner Model was born, and alongside it, the ‘feminisation’ of the home: men earned and women cared. Production was remunerated in money, whilst reproduction was remunerated in social esteem and virtue. And when women did work outside the home, such as in the “dark satanic mills” of the Greater Manchester cotton industry, commentators decried the “destruction of the family” and the de-feminisation of women.
Karl Marx, famously not a supporter of women’s equality, lamented the loss of free domestic labour that women’s labour market participation represented. Dr Hawkins, factory surgeon and inspector, noted in 1833 that the working wives of the industrialising cities “fall remarkably short of the usual characteristics of the English wife”. Those women were not fulfilling their domestic duties “no cookery, no washing, no making, no mending, no decencies of life, no invitations to the fire-side.”
“Family wages for men” was the trade union cry, and by the middle of the twentieth century, the separate spheres of production and reproduction had been crystallised by the state. Rather than using growing tax-revenues to support women’s re-entry into the workforce by ‘socialising’ care, policy measures were built on the assumption that women were housewives, like the daily school timetable which made anything other than part-time work near impossible or pensions which rewarded male wages more than female ones. But by the 1980s, the marriage of liberal feminism with pro-market thinking resulted in the double-earner family, which contracted out care to an army of low-wage cleaners and nannies, often from overseas.
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