Lynn Prince Cook, “The Politics of Housework”

“The Politics of Housework”

Lynn Prince Cooke

Chapter Four, Dividing the Domestic: Men, Women, and Household Work in Cross-National Perspective, Edited by Judith Treas and Sonja Drobnic, Stanford University Press, 2010. [PDF]

Love occurs in context, yet the dominant theories of how couples divide up housework model the interactions between two adults as if they occurred in a social cocoon. For example, bargaining or social exchange theories focused on the power derived from paid work and predicted women’s increasing employment would lead to men performing more domestic tasks.1 However, an increase in men’s domestic share during the past decades stems primarily from the dramatic decline in women’s housework hours, not substantial increases in men’s.2 The persistence of the gendered division of housework regardless of a woman’s employment supports the gender perspective that our daily activities reflect and reinforce normative expectations of masculine and feminine behavior (West and Zimmerman 1987). These normative expectations vary across social classes or ethnic groups, as well as across countries, reflecting gender regimes (Connell 1987) or cultures (Pfau-Effinger 1998). Norms also evolve over time, albeit more slowly and less spectacularly than we had first anticipated. In sum, how couples might divide paid and unpaid labor in the household varies across class, ethnic, temporal, and country contexts.

Only recently, however, have researchers begun to explore how couples’ sharing of housework varies within its sociopolitical as well as temporal contexts. This research has yielded somewhat conflicting evidence, in part because theory development linking context with individual behavior lags behind the available international data. Most analyses to date have focused on policy effects on women’s equality in the public spheres such as education, employment, or political representation (Baxter 1997; Fuwa 2004). Equally important and intertwined with equality in the public sphere is whether policies reinforce women’s normative responsibility for the private sphere. In this chapter I outline how a broad range of policies influences women’s access to paid work as well as their continued responsibility for unpaid domestic activities, illustrated with examples from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These three countries are based in British common law and share a liberal political ideology vis-à-vis reliance on the market over state provision of welfare, similarities that would lead us to expect common policy effects on the gendered division of labor across them. When comparing specific policies, however, the countries vary more in the degree to which the state shapes gender equality, so that we might find greater variation in how housework is divided within and across couples.

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, “The ‘Hidden Side’ of the New Economy: On Transnational Migration, Domestic Work, and Unprecedented Intimacy”

“The ‘Hidden Side’ of the New Economy: On Transnational Migration, Domestic Work, and Unprecedented Intimacy“

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

Frontiers, vol. 28, no. 3, 2007

Introduction

Migration is a topic that occupies the front page of every newspaper in Europe today. As one of the constantly reiterated items in television news, it engages politicians as well as scholars. In times of globalization, migration is viewed both as a cause and a consequence of the intensive exchange of commodities, goods, and capital across national borders. This phenomenon is, however, not new. After all, during colonial times,1 migratory movements occurred that were, as Kien Nghi Ha stresses, at least “bidirectional” and tied to complex relations of power.2 Today, traces of colonialism inform the patterns, modes, and cultural narratives of migration. Transnational migration has evolved in a global setting marked by postcolonial cultural, economic, and political relationships, as well as by new forms of imperial power. Within this historical context and global conjuncture I would like to discuss the “hidden side” of the new economy: care and domestic work. As Eleonore Kofman and Parvati Raghuram3 note with reference to Arlie Russell Hochschild,4 care and domestic work (and I also would suggest sex work) form part of global-gendered inequalities which “are transferred along chains of care, with care provided by Third World women in households in affluent societies.”5

Erik S. McDuffie, “Esther V. Cooper’s ”The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism”: Black Left Feminism and the Popular Front”

“Esther V. Cooper’s ”The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism”: Black Left Feminism and the Popular Front“

Erik S. McDuffie

American Communist History, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 [PDF]

Esther V. Cooper’s brilliant 120-page 1940 M.A. thesis, ”The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism,” still stands as the most thorough sociological and historical study written on the working conditions and status of black women household workers and their efforts to unionize during the Depression.1 The ”Negro Woman Domestic Worker” was a crucial part of her early intellectual foundation, helping to set the stage for her staunch support for civil rights, social justice, internationalism, and radical democracy with special concern for African-American women that were trade marks of her life’s work. It also stands as a marker for what could have been a significantly different life journey for her.2

The thesis, above all, contains broad significance for understanding black women’s activism and black radicalism during the Popular Front. It reveals an emergent black left feminism, a politics that centers working-class women by combining Communist Party positions on race, gender, and class with black nationalism and black radical women’s lived experiences, embedded in their writings and activism. Black left feminism paid special attention to the intersectional, transnational nature of African-American women’s oppression and viewed them as key agents for transformative change. Committed to the Popular Front agenda of civil rights, trade unionism, anti-fascism, internationalism, and concern for women’s equality, their work anticipating conclusions drawn by ”second wave” black feminism decades later.3

Eileen Boris and Premilla Nadasen, ”Domestic Workers Organize!”

“Domestic Workers Organize!”

Eileen Boris and Premilla Nadasen

WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society Vol. 11 Dec. 2008, pp. 413–43. [PDF]

This article traces the history of domestic worker organizing in the U.S. It challenges the long-standing assumption that these—primarily women of color—cleaners, nannies, and elder care providers are unorganizable and assesses the possibilities and limitations of recent organizing efforts. The nature of the occupation—its location in the home, the isolated character of the work, informal arrangements with employers, and exclusions from labor law protection—has fostered community-based, social movement organizing to build coalitions, reform legislation and draw public attention to the plight of domestic workers. Their successes, as well as the obstacles they encounter, hold lessons for other low-wage service sector workers in a new global economy. Domestic workers have integrated an analysis of race, class, culture, and gender—a form of social justice feminism—into their praxis, thus formulating innovative class-based strategies. Yet long-term reform has remained elusive because of their limited power to shape state policy.

Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Slave Market”

“The Slave Market”

Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke

From The Crisis 42 (Nov. 1935).

The Bronx Slave Market! What is it? Who are its dealers? Who are its victims? What are its causes? How far does its stench spread? What forces are at work to counteract it?

Any corner in the congested sections of New York City’s Bronx is fertile soil for mushroom “slave marts.” The two where the traffic is heaviest and the bidding is highest are located at 167th street and Jerome Avenue and at Simpson and Westchester avenues.

Symbolic of the more humane slave block is the Jerome avenue “market.” There, on benches surrounding a green square, the victims wait, grateful, at least, for some place to sit. In direct contrast is the Simpson avenue “mart,” where they pose wearily against buildings and lampposts, or scuttle about in an attempt to retrieve discarded boxes upon which to rest.

Again, the Simpson avenue block exudes the stench of the slave market at its worst. Not only is human labor bartered and sold for slave wage, but human love also is a marketable commodity. But whether it is labor, or love that is sold, economic necessity compels the sale. As early as 8 a.m. they come; as late as 1 p.m. they remain.

Rain or shine, cold or hot, you will find them there – Negro women, old and young – sometimes bedraggled, sometimes neatly dressed – but with the invariable paper bundle, waiting expectantly for Bronx housewives to buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or even for a day at the munificent rate of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, or, if luck be with them, thirty cents an hour. If not the wives themselves, maybe their husbands, their sons, or their brothers, under the subterfuge of work, offer worldly-wise girls higher bids for their time.

Who are these women? What brings them here? Why do they stay? In the boom days before the onslaught of the depression in 1929, many of these women who are now forced to bargain for day’s work on street corners, were employed in grand homes in the rich Eighties, or in wealthier homes in Long Island and Westchester, at more than adequate wages. Some are former marginal industrial workers, forced by the slack in industry to seek other means of sustenance. In many instances there had been no necessity for work at all. But whatever their standing prior to the depression, none sought employment where they now seek it. They come to the Bronx, not because of what it promises, but largely in desperation.

Paradoxically, the crash of 1929 brought to the domestic labor market a new employer class. The lower middle-class housewife, who, having dreamed of the luxury of a maid, found opportunity staring her in tee face in the form of Negro women pressed to the wall by poverty, starvation and discrimination.

Where once color was the “gilt edged” security for obtaining domestic and personal service jobs, here, even, Negro women found themselves being displaced by whites. Hours of futile waiting in employment agencies, the fee that must be paid despite the lack of income, fraudulent agencies that sprung up during the depression, all forced the day worker to fend for herself or try the dubious and circuitous road to public relief.

As inadequate as emergency relief has been, it has proved somewhat of a boon to many of these women, for with its advent, actual starvation is no longer their ever-present slave driver and they have been able to demand twenty-five and even thirty cents an hour as against the old fifteen and twenty cent rate. In an effort to supplement the inadequate relief received, many seek this open market.

And what a market! She who is fortunate (?) enough to please Mrs. Simon Legree’s scrutinizing eye is led away to perform hours of multifarious household drudgeries. Under a rigid watch, she is permitted to scrub floors on her bended knees, to hang precariously from window sills, cleaning window after window, or to strain and sweat over steaming tubs of heavy blankets, spreads and furniture covers.

Fortunate, indeed, is she who gets the full hourly rate promised. Often, her day’s slavery is rewarded with a single dollar bill or whatever her unscrupulous employer pleases to pay. More often, the clock is set back for an hour or more. Too often she is sent away without any pay at all.

bell hooks, “Feminist Parenting”

“Feminist Parenting”

bell hooks

Chapter 13, Feminism is for Everybody, South End Press, 2000. [PDF]

Feminist focus on children was a central component of contemporary radical feminist movement. By raising children without sexism women hoped to create a future world where there would be no need for an anti-sexist movement. Initially the focus on children primarily highlighted sexist sex roles and the way in which they were imposed on children from birth on. Feminist attention to children almost always focused on girl children, on attacking sexist biases and promoting alternative images. Now and then feminists would call attention to the need to raise boys in an anti-sexist manner but for the most part the critique of male patriarchy, the insistence that all men had it better than all women, trickled down. The assumption that boys always had more privilege and power than girls fueled feminists prioritizing a focus on girls.

One of the primary difficulties feminist thinkers faced when confronting sexism within families was that more often than not female parents were the transmitters of sexist thinking. Even in households where no adult male parental caregiver was present, women taught and teach children sexist thinking. Ironically, many people assume that any female-headed household is automatically matriarchal. In actuality women who head households in patriarchal society often feel guilty about the absence of a male figure and are hypervigilant about imparting sexist values to children, especially males. In recent times mainstream conservative pundits have responded to a wellspring of violent acts by young males of all classes and races by suggesting that single women cannot possible raise a healthy male child. This is just simply not true. The facts show that some of the most loving and powerful men in our society were raised by single mothers. Again it must be reiterated that most people assume that a woman raising children alone, especially sons, will fail to teach a male child how to become a patriarchal male. This is simply not the case.

María Isabel Casas-Cortés, “Towards a Theory of Care / Hacia una Teoria del Cuidado: Ethnographic Accounts of Changing Political Subjects and Strategies”

“Towards a Theory of Care / Hacia una Teoria del Cuidado: Ethnographic Accounts of Changing Political Subjects and Strategies” 1

María Isabel Casas-Cortés

Chapter 7, Social Movements as Sites of Knowledge Production: Precarious Work, the Fate of Care and Activist Research in a Globalizing Spain. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009. [PDF]

Introduction

Shortly upon our arrival to the Lavapies neighborhood, and after attending a couple of meetings organized by Precarias, I received a mysterious email in my inbox:

Precarias a la Deriva ha Muerto, Viva Precarias a la Deriva!

Precarias a la Deriva is dead, long live Precarias a la Deriva!
(email on PD list-serve, March 15th 2007)

The “death notice”, as they called it, explained the transition period that Precarias was at the time going through. Since 2006, this feminist project engaged in a new experiment under the name of “Agencia de Asuntos Precarios”. Under this institutional sounding name -Agency of Precarious Affairs-, they made an attempt to formalize many of the relationships, resources and knowledges gained during the previous research phase. The Agency has currently an office space available every Saturday afternoon at Embajadores Street, a few blocks down from the previous squatted building that had to be evicted by order from the Madrid municipality. The new locale of Eskalera Karakola, the mythical women’s social center, is now located right across the street from Traficantes de Sueños, the alternative bookshop and publishing house, close to the local fresh food market, the muslim mosque and one of the libraries of the Universidad Nacional a Distancia, itself located in an old monastery destroyed during the Spanish Civil war.2 The new Eskalera Karakola, in contrast to the previous old building, is rented at an affordable price from the municipality and after a process of re-construction, now has a contemporary look, with a large meeting room, a radio studio, telephone line and a series of archives and basic technological support.3 Having this space available regularly and open to the public, makes this phase more prompted to act locally. This is in contrast with the previous phase, in that even if that phase had been a place-based research project, their material and effects ended up being more internationally oriented than expected. In this sense, La Agencia might be thought of as part of “the current process of territorialization of global justice movements” – meaning a tendency towards local concerns and organizing at the level of the lived territory, shared by many global justice initiatives at least in Europe (interview with MayDay Sur organizer, April 2008).

Kevin Van Meter, “The Moment I Cannot Escape: Care, Death, Mourning, and the Struggle Against It All”

“The Moment I Cannot Escape: Care, Death, Mourning, and the Struggle Against It All”
Kevin Van Meter | Team Colors [PDF]

Riding the N train home to Brooklyn from a temp job in midtown Manhattan in early December, I find myself standing in a crowded car looking on at an elderly couple sitting before me. Exhausted from the day, I forego reading to people-watch and listen to a new album, deciding to give it another chance after seeing the band perform it live. I come across a lyric that intertwines with this scene: “Always reaching for her / Always breathing for her / Lifting his hand to the sky / Slow change might bring / Holy tears”.

Within a few moments it is clear to me that the gentleman is caring for the woman, who is quite ill. He holds her trembling hand, gives her sips of water as he touches her cheeks and brow to check for an elevated temperature. Towards the end of the ride, he coaxes her to take a few brightly colored pills, which she has trouble getting down.

Immediately, I can see the affect in his eyes and his movements, the pride joined with need in hers, and the relationship of care between them. I recognize this quite clearly because – from early May, when her condition worsened, until end of July, when she passed into the unknown – I was caring for my partner, best friend and constant companion in a similar way. As it was with this couple on the train, just a few months earlier, it was with her and I.

The Moment I Cannot Escape: Care, Death, Mourning and the Struggle Against It All explores three chronological periods in my life, and the life and passing of my partner, as it flows from caring for her into her passing, and then into the impossible grief and mourning that follows. While this is immensely personal[,] it intersects with a set of political realities – the imposition and discipline of capital and the state-apparatus, as well as forms of life and methods of struggle – that I will explore through my story, hers and the community that surrounds us both. But before all this there is a moment, one that I cannot escape, and it serves as the pivot in these periods I will describe.

Stevphen Shukaitis, “Questions for Aeffective Resistance”

“Questions for Aeffective Resistance”

Stevphen Shukaitis

Chapter Eight, Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life, Autonomedia, 2009. [PDF]

 

 

Each wound accumulated over the years, each hope frustrated feels a part of your pain and disappointment. Often I wonder, what the heck keeps us going on, despite such hurt affected in a walk that is supposed to be beautiful, trustful, liberating, juvenating? I do not know any more, or forgot what I once knew. Perhaps those glimpses we have had, here and there, planned or spontaneous, with friends or with strangers, glimpses of “the best” in each one of us, in love, risk, togetherness, joy, labor, and, yes, in pain and disappointment. It seems to me that there is no obvious “reason” we must hang in there, except the reasons we can provide for and with each other in the midst of this insanity that passes for reality, left and right. What can I say, but that if we fail to be that reason, let us, at least, fail better. – Ayca Cubukcu 1

I’m tired. It’s 3 am. The desk is stacked tall with too many things to be done, too many projects that have fallen behind schedule, and ideas that would come to fruition beautifully if only there was time for them to be born. If only there was time. But there never seems to be. The endless march of everyday pressures and gripes mounts endlessly-the moment it seems that they have been beaten back, that there are conditions of respite to move from with thought out intentions-the flood just sweeps in again. And my whole body aches. It never seems possible to catch up with this mounting pile of tasks. Sometimes I wonder whether this constant sense of growing tiredness might just be something that’s my fault, something I caused by taking on too many projects and not managing time effectively. Perhaps. Surely there are few foolish enough to make this kind of mistake, voluntarily taking just enough so that they don’t totally collapse, but always teetering close to doing so.

Li-Fang Liang, “The Construction of Global City: Invisible Work and Disposable Labor”

“The Construction of Global City: Invisible Work and Disposable Labor”

Li-Fang Liang [PDF]

Ph. D Candidate, Sociology Department Maxwell of Public Affair School, Syracuse University

In 1992, in order to satisfy demographic necessities and increasing double-salary families, the Taiwanese government allowed the immigration of domestic workers and caregivers as part of the short-term contract labor force to shoulder the responsibilities of caring for patients, the elderly and younger children. The number of domestic workers and caregivers has reached 151,747 in 2006, more than one-third of the population of migrant workers. Around one third of migrant domestic workers and caregivers are concentrated in the metropolitan area of Taipei, the largest city in Taiwan. In this essay, I situate Taipei as an emerging “global city” that is the theoretical concept proposed by Saskia Sassen to explain the relationships between global capital mobility and the flows of labor migration. On the one hand, I elucidate the increasing availability of domestic and care work in order to satisfy the physical and emotional needs of white-collar and professional class workers in global cities through the gendered-racialized division of labor. On the other hand, I emphasize the role of state in terms of facilitating to create the gendered-racialized market that serves the economic interests of receiving state and the specific class privileged group. I explore how the coordination of state’s migrant labor policy, regulations and bureaucratic procedures that marginalizes these female workers’ lives and treats them as disposable labor in the context of improving economic development.

Amaia Pérez Orozco, “Spain: 2002 General Strike – Feminist Perspectives”

“Spain: 2002 General Strike – Feminist Perspectives”

Amaia Pérez Orozco

November 2002 [link]

On 20th June the fifth general strike in Spain since the restoration of democracy in 1977 took place. It was organised by the two main Spanish trade unions (CCOO and UGT) and other minor ones, in response to the approved governmental decree RD-L 5/2002 “Reform of the protection of unemployment and the basic law on employment”, approved in the 27^th May with the only favourable votes of the governing People’s Party . This strike led to the reversal of some of the most criticised points of the new law and in that sense was quite successful. But diverse and seemingly contradictory positions within feminism arose in the debate. For some feminist groups one of the major impacts of the general strike was highlighting the lack of a unitary and coherent discourse and thus the need to start a process of reflection and discussion.

The evolution of economic policy in Spain has not differed from the global trend towards freer markets, progressive privatisation and decreasing Welfare State provisions. Among those increasingly deregulated markets is the labour market (national labour markets, but not international ones, where more restrictive migration rules are being established; Spain is relentlessly playing its role of gatekeeper of the “nearest to Africa European door”!). So more precarious and unsafe forms of contracting have emerged, dismissals have been facilitated and became cheaper, unemployment protection has been weakened, and general social protection has been damage. Through this long ongoing process five general strikes have been organised: 20^th June 1985, 14^th December 1988, 28^th May 1992, 27^th January 1994 and 20^th June 2002. Only the second of the first four strikes achieved its goals, namely reversing the Plan for Youth Employment, the defining features of which were nevertheless approved some years later The last one was the first against a conservative government, while the others occurred under a socialist one. It occurred in a context of progressive erosion of remunerated workers’ rights, some of them sanctified by the agreements reached between the Government and the two largest unions. Thus, although the decree was what triggered the protests, other events such as unpopular changes of the educational system and financial scandals within state agencies meant that the climate was already created for popular unrest.

María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Flexible girls. A position paper on academic genderational politics”

“Flexible girls. A position paper on academic genderational politics” [1]

María Puig de la Bellacasa

Luisa Passerini, Dawn Lyon, Liana Borghi (eds.) 2002, Gender studies in Europe/Studi di genere in Europa, European University Institute, Universita di Firenze, in association with ATHENA [PDF]

This paper is based on my intervention during the roundtable Transitions and Transmissions: two-way traffic at the conference Gender Studies in Europe the 2nd April 2001 at the European Institut, Firenze. I would first like to comment on this title, chosen for the discussion by one of the organisers, Dawn Lyon. These preliminary notes mark the paper thoroughly.

The idea of a “two way traffic” going on between generations responds to a certain kind of time trade familiar to the feminist genderational [2] politics I have had the occasion to experiment. The conference gave good examples of this: on the one hand, ‘baby-boomers’ foot-note with humour their re-affirmation of personal-political engagement as ‘maybe old-fashioned’; on the other hand, ‘twenty-thirty somethings’ supposedly less politicised or at least politically different, paradoxically also claim this engagement, driving back in a two-way traffic flow. I will come back to this (mis)understandings and (un)coincidences between genderations’ engagements.

Secondly, the title could also signify our times, specially the assumption that we live in a back and forth flowing world, where boundaries are difficult to draw, and power relationships (too?) complex to be tracked. We live in the middle of a process, struggling to build meanings for extremely fast changing realities. As a white western privileged city woman, fast ongoing traffic appears to me as a recognizable image for this accelerated and fluid existence, constantly needing ‘stress management’ and ‘adaptability’. Madonna’s ‘material girl’ better be today a ‘flexible girl’. This contribution will address critically this ‘flexible paradigm’.

Arlie Hochschild, “Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses”

“Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses“

Arlie Hochschild

Chapter Six, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983. [PDF]

 

If they could have turned every one of us into sweet quiet Southern belles with velvet voices like Rosalyn Carter, this is what they would want to stamp out on an assembly line.
Flight attendant, Delta Airlines

On PSA our smiles are not just painted on.
So smile your way From LA To San Francisco
PSA radio jingle

When you see them receiving passengers with that big smile, I don’t think it means anything. They have to do that. It’s part of their job. But now if you get into a conversation with a flight attendant . . . well . . . no. . . I guess they have to do that too.
Airline passenger

When rules about how to feel and how to express feeling are set by management, when workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers do, when deep and surface acting are forms of labor to be sold, and when private capacities for empathy and warmth are put to corporate uses, what happens to the way a person relates to her feelings or to her face? When worked-up warmth becomes an instrument of service work, what can a person learn about herself from her feelings? And when a worker abandons her work smile, what kind of tie remains between her smile and her self?

Display is what is sold, but over the long run display comes to assume a certain relation to feeling. As enlightened management realizes, a separation of display and feeling is hard to keep up over long periods. A principle of emotive dissonance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance, is at work. Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. We try to reduce this strain by pulling the two closer together, either by changing what we feel or by changing what we feign. When display is required by the job, it is usually feeling that has to change; and when conditions estrange us from our face, they sometimes estrange us from feeling as well.

Take the case of the flight attendant. Corporate logic in the airline industry creates a series of links between competition, market expansion, advertising, heightened passenger expectations about rights to display, and company demands for acting. When conditions allow this logic to work, the result is a successful transmutation of the private emotional system we have described. The old elements of emotional exchange – feeling rules, surface acting, and deep acting – are now arranged in a different way. Stanislavski’s if moves from stage to airline cabin (”act as if the cabin were your own living room”) as does the actor’s use of emotion memory. Private use gives way to corporate use.

In the airline industry of the 1950s and 1960s a remarkable transmutation was achieved. But certain trends, discussed later in this chapter, led this transmutation to fail in the early 1970s. An industry speed-up and a stronger union hand in limiting the company’s claims weakened the transmutation. There was a service worker ”slowdown.” Worked-up warmth of feeling was replaced by put-on smiles. Those who sincerely wanted to make the deeper offering found they could not do so, and those who all along had resisted company intrusions on the self came to feel some rights to freedom from it. The job lost its grip. When the transmutation succeeded, the worker was asked to take pride in making an instrument of feeling. When it collapsed, workers came to see that instrument as overused, underappreciated, and susceptible to damage.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Rustic and Ethical”

“Rustic and Ethical”
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
translated by Giuseppina Mecchia
ephemera volume 7(1): 107-116, 2007 [PDF]

The organisational and communicative effort which has blossomed in Italy in the first few years of the new millennium around the issue of a peasant-based agriculture brings to the fore agricultural realities – old and new alike, but all endowed with an extraordinary wealth of propositions – which afford us not only the pleasure of an intelligent discussion, but also the joy of emotional investment. We experience the thrill of witnessing growth, the exultancy of spring, the opportunity to perceive colours and to enjoy silence. This is the humanity of a different agriculture, coming out of its hills to reveal new paths to all those who want to reclaim their lives starting from a different relationship with the earth. Here I am alluding not only to the individuals or the associations engaged in organic agriculture, but also to the initiatives in favour of preserving animal biodiversity which are engaged in the recuperation of little known rustic breeds presenting rare characteristics. These are hardy and productive local breeds of horses, cattle and fowl, extremely resistant even in harsh conditions. But since capitalist productivity, unlike nature, is hostile to diversity and requires uniformity, the rustic breeds would risk becoming extinct if it weren’t for the efforts of those who love them. Humanity faces a similar problem. We too have to salvage our rusticity, which makes us strong and diverse. If we don’t recognise it, if we don’t love it, it will be crushed by increasingly homogenizing mutations.

The peasant voice, even through other subjects, has now created a rich and diverse debate, ranging from practical issues on the techniques involved in a different kind of agriculture, to efforts in delineating a different social project. It now starts to intersect other issues in our movement, new and old, such as poverty or instability, which actually started with the expulsion of people from the agricultural lands. Some critics (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 151) have said that, after having been considered backward, passive and conservative, also by the Marxist tradition, the figure of the peasant will no longer be seen as part of a separate world and will fully become part of the multitude thanks to the new forms of communication. Nonetheless, this can only be possible if the peasants are to construct forms of struggle aimed at the transformation of the totality of life. The conditional character of this assessment is surprising. If, in fact, there is a common aspect to the whole peasant movement, which in the last decades has built networks from the South to the North of the world in 65 different countries, it is precisely the opening of a discourse about the transformation of all aspects of life. This transformation is not a simple and empty demand, but a necessity. Because the will to rethink our relationship with the earth, whose negation (as expropriation and dramatic alteration) has always constituted the foundation of capitalist development, it implies a break with the whole process and the subversion of its conditions, while laying the ground for another development. This development will be ‘other’ because, first of all, it no longer considers the spread of death and hunger as the inevitable precondition for the creation of wealth as value. We are faced with an alternative: either this peasant understanding of development – which considers the earth from the perspective of ‘food sovereignty’ since it is the only guarantor of life at the planetary level – will prevail, or we will be confronted with infinite variations on the constant of hunger. Therefore, the struggle of the peasant movement is the exemplary biopolitical struggle. The opening up of what some people call biopolitical struggles is not a problem for the peasants, as it might be for others. What might be missing, on the other hand, is the will, on the part of these other political subjects, to start from the same basic concerns.

Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation”

“Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation”
Nancy Fraser
Thesis Eleven No. 17, 1987.

What some writers are calling “the coming welfare wars” will be largely wars about, even against, women. Because women comprise the overwhelming majority of social-welfare program recipients and employees, women and women’s needs will be the principal stakes in the battles over social spending likely to dominate national politics in the coming period. Moreover, the welfare wars will not be limited to the tenure of Reagan or even of Reaganism. On the contrary, they will be protracted wars both in time and in space. What James O’Connor theorized nearly fifteen years ago as “the fiscal crisis of the state” is a long-term, structural phenomenon of international proportions. Not just the U.S., but every late-capitalist welfare state in Western Europe and North America is facing some version of it.’ And the fiscal crisis of the welfare state coincides everywhere with a second long-term, structural tendency: the feminization of poverty. This is Diana Pearce’s term for the rapidly increasing proportion of women in the adult poverty population, an increase tied to, inter alia, the rise in “female-headed households.” 1,2 In the U.S., this trend is so pronounced and so steep that analysts project that, should it continue, the poverty population will consist entirely of women and their children before the year 2000.3

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Deschooling Society

Ivan Illich

New York, Harper & Row, 1971.

Contents

Introduction xix

1. Why We Must Disestablish School

2. Phenomenology of School

3. Ritualization of Progress

4. Institutional Spectrum

5. Irrational Consistencies

6. Learning Webs

7. Rebirth of Epimethean Man

Lisa Dodson and Rebekah M. Zincavage, “‘It’s like a family’: Caring labor, exploitation, and race in nursing homes”

“‘It’s like a family’: Caring labor, exploitation, and race in nursing homes”

Lisa Dodson and Rebekah M. Zincavage

Gender & Society December 1, 2007 21: 905-928 [PDF]

This article contributes to carework scholarship by examining the nexus of gender, class, and race in long-term care facilities. We draw out a family ideology at work that promotes good care of residents and thus benefits nursing homes. We also found that careworkers value fictive kin relationships with residents, yet we uncover how the family model may be used to exploit these low-income careworkers. Reflecting a subordinate and racialized version of being “part of the family,” we call for an ethic of reciprocity and for concrete change toward valuing equally the humanity of those who need and those who give care.

AUTHORS’ NOTE: We are very grateful to Christine Bishop and the Better Jobs Better Care research team members for their collaboration in this project, sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies. We thank Wendy Luttrell, Marjorie DeVault, and Catherine Riessman for early comments and ongoing support. We also wish to thank the anonymous Gender & Society reviewers and Dana Britton for their thoughtful comments on this article. We are indebted to the men and women who participated in this study for trusting us enough to share their experiences and insights with grace and honesty. Finally, we want to recognize the outstanding contribution of the late Susan Eaton who believed that good care of vulnerable people is essentially tied to decent jobs for careworkers.

 

“[T]he same way I think about my mother, this is the same way I’m thinking about these residents. I consider them like they are my own. But it’s a very hard job, we don’t get paid enough for the job, and sometimes you feel like every day you do more and more and more, and the money is less.”
-Certified Nursing Assistant

Over the last two decades a “crisis in care” has provoked difficult questions and a complex critique about the meaning and value of purchased care in contemporary society. Historically family relationships and the market had been seen as separate worlds; one did not trespass onto the other. Yet carework, historically a taken-for-granted female activity, has increasingly demanded market valuation as millions of women left homemaking for paid employment, expanding the need for hired care providers. Today in the United States, with an ever-growing population of elderly and chronically ill people, long-term care has become an urgent and complex care demand.

As in the past, those who enter the low-paid care labor market tend to be poor women, often native-born women of color and immigrants (Dawson and Surpin 2001; Duffy 2007; Glenn 1992; Romero 1992). This paper draws from interviews, focus groups, observational data, and a survey from research in 18 long-term care residential facilities in Massachusetts. From these multiple sources, we explicate an ideology of family that consistently emerged as integral to the design and understanding of care for residents. Further, we examine how family ideology drives expectations of the kind of care provided by certified nursing assistants (CNAs) who, as one facility director put it, are “the backbone of the nursing home industry.” As theorized in scholarship on caring labor across disciplines (DeVault 1991; Folbre 2002; Kittay 1999; Stone 2005; Uttal and Tuominen 1999) our research uncovers the tension experienced by careworkers as they manage their work as both a job and as a commitment to care for fictive family members.

We begin this paper by situating our discussion in recent scholarship at the intersection of family ideology and purchased carework. This is followed by a brief description of the growing demand for long-term care, the nature of the work, and an overview of the workforce. Turning to our research, we identify a family model posited by both nursing home managers and CNAs as essential for providing good care to frail and dependent people. We reveal, however, this model of kinship is “one way,” benefiting the residents and nursing homes but essentially denying reciprocity to CNAs. We also explore the racialization of the occupation of the CNA, a dynamic that brings to mind the historical image of women of color working as domestics, servants, and nannies, expected to willingly sacrifice themselves and their families to take care of those who employed them (Glenn 1992; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Omolade 1994; Romero 1992; Rollins 1985; Wong 1994).

Finally, we challenge the use of an institutional culture of family that is specifically designed to extract more work from the lowest-paid workers- often native-born women of color and immigrants. We join others who argue that meeting a growing public need for long-term care demands an ethic of reciprocity: considerate, high-quality care for those who need it, and respect and decent compensation for those who provide this critical labor.

Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life”

“Friendship as a Way of Life”

Michel Foucault

R. de Ceccaty, J. Danet, and J. Le Bitoux conducted this interview with Foucault for the French magazine Gai Pied. It appeared in April 1981. The text that appears here, translated by John Johnston, has been amended.

Q. You’re in your fifties. You’re a reader of Le Gai Pied, which has been in existence now for two years. Is the kind of discourse you find there something positive for you?

M.F. That the magazine exists is the positive and important thing.
In answer” to your question, I could say that I don’t have to read it to voice the question of my age. What I could ask of your magazine is that I do not, in reading it, have to pose the question of my age. Now, reading it…

Q. Perhaps the problem is the age group of those who contribute to it and read it; the majority are between twenty-five and thirty-five.

M.F. Of course. The more it is written by young people the more it concerns young people. But the problem is not to make room for one age group alongside another but to find out what can be done in relation to the quasi identification between homosexuality and the love among young people. Another thing to distrust is the tendency to relate the question of homosexuality to the problem of “Who am I?” and “What is the secret of my desire?” Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, “‘What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?” The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are. The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship.

Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, “Organizing Home Care: Low-Waged Workers in the Welfare State”

“Organizing Home Care: Low-Waged Workers in the Welfare State“

Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein

Politics and Society, Vol. 34 No.1, March 2006, 81-107. [PDF]

Commemorating the death of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1988, a hundred Los Angeles home care workers marched to demand union recognition. “This is Memphis all over again,” civil rights leaders addressed the mostly female and minority crowd. “We are saying again today, ‘We are somebody.’ We’re men and women who deserve to be treated with dignity”! For over a decade, all across the nation, these caretakers of the frail elderly and the disabled had been asking for “respect, dignity and an increase in our wages.”2 They were a hidden workforce, located in the home and confused with both the labor of domestic servants and the care work of wives and mothers.3 After 74,000 entered the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 1999, media celebrated these minimum-waged, predominantly Latina, Black, and immigrant women, who pulled off the largest gain in union membership since the sit-down strikes of the 1930s.4 This organizing, however, depended on the welfare state location of the labor-that is, on the prior organizing of home care through law and social policy during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market”

“Women on the Market”

Luce Irigaray

Chapter Eight, This Sex Which Is Not One [PDF], 1985.

This text was originally published as “Le marche des femmes,” in Sessualita
e politica, (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978).

The society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women. Without the exchange of women, we are told, we would fall back into the anarchy (?) of the natural world, the randomness (?) of the animal kingdom. The passage into the social order, into the symbolic order, into order as such, is assured by the fact that men, or groups of men, circulate women among themselves, according to a rule known as the incest taboo.

Whatever familial form this prohibition may take in a given state of society, its signification has a much broader impact. It assures the foundation of the economic, social, and cultural order that has been ours for centuries.

Why exchange women? Because they are “scarce [commodities] . . . essential to the life of the group,” the anthropologist tells us.1 Why this characteristic of scarcity, given the biological equilibrium between male and female births? Because the “deep polygamous tendency, which exists among all men, always makes the number of available women seem insufficient. Let us add that even if there were as many women as men, these women would not be equally desirable … and that, by definition. . ., the most desirable women must form a minority. “2

Are men all equally desirable? Do women have no tendency toward polygamy? The good anthropologist does not raise such questions. A fortiori: why are men not objects of exchange among women? It is because women’s bodies-through their use, consumption, and circulation-provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown “infrastructure” of the elaboration of that social life and culture. The exploitation of the matter that has been sexualized female is so integral a part of our sociocultural horizon that there is no way to interpret it except within this horizon.

In still other words: all the systems of exchange that organize patriarchal societies and all the modalities of productive work that are recognized, valued, and rewarded in these societies are men’s business. The production of women, signs, and commodities is always referred back to men (when a man buys a girl, he “pays” the father or the brother, not the mother … ), and they always pass from one man to another, from one group of men to another. The work force is thus always assumed to be masculine, and “products” are objects to be used, objects of transaction among men alone.