Love's Labor

Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency

Eva Feder Kittay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351611503
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This new edition of Eva Feder Kittay's feminist classic, Love's Labor, explores how theories of justice and morality must be reconfigured when intersecting with care and dependency, and the failure of policy towards women who engage in care work. The work is hailed as a major contribution to the development of an ethics of care.

Where society is viewed as an association of equal and autonomous persons, the work of caring for dependents figures neither in political theory nor in social policy. While some women have made many gains, equality continues to elude many others, as in large measure, social institutions fail to take into account the dependency of childhood, illness, disability and frail old age and fail to adequately support those who care for dependents. Using a narrative of her experiences caring for her disabled daughter, Eva Feder Kittay discusses the relevance of her analysis of dependency to significant cognitive disability. She explores the significance of dependency work by analyzing John Rawls' influential liberal theory and two examples of public policy—welfare reform and family leave—to show how theory and policy fail women when they miss the centrality of dependency to issues of justice. This second edition has updated material on care workers, her adult disabled daughter and key changes in welfare reform.

Using a mix of personal reflection and political argument, this new edition of a classic text will continue to be an innovative and influential contribution to the debate on searching for greater equality and justice for women.

Love's Labor has spoken to audiences around the world and has had an impact on readers from many countries and in many disciplines: philosophy, sociology, disability studies, nursing. It has been required and supplementary reading on many undergraduate courses on Ethics, Feminist Ethics, Gender and Religious Ethics, Political Theory, Bioethics and Disability Studies. It has been translated into Italian, Japanese and Korean.

PART I

Love’s Labor

The Requirements of Dependency

1

Relationships of Dependency and Equality

Reflections on Being a Mother’s Child

My mother has been serving us dinner. My father and I are nearly finished eating. She alone remains unfed. A sigh announces the completion of her task and the beginning of a well-deserved respite. She sits down to eat. With a shrug and smile, and with a touch of ironic humor, she says, “After all, I’m also a mother’s child.”

As a child I found this habitual remark confusing. As a woman, now trained in philosophy, I can hope to articulate both the child’s puzzlement and the import of my mother’s message. “My mother is also a mother’s child.” For a child who sees a parent as Hobbes (1966, 109) saw his parties to the social contract, “as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms,”¹ the message never fails to come as a realization. Yes, everyone is some mother’s child. As good-natured as the pronouncement was, it was a sort of self-assertion, an entitlement claim. I could not understand the need for claiming the entitlement; first, because I did not think that her desire to sit quietly and eat her own meal needed justification; second, because I could not understand whom she might think denied her rightful claim, against whom she was making it; and finally (most puzzling of all), I could not understand how asserting that she too was a mother’s child would be a basis for any entitlement. What was she thereby asserting? What was the claim in need of assertion? And why was the fact—one might better say the truism—that she, too, was a mother’s child a basis upon which to make any claims?

Although a child (but old enough to be perplexed by my mother’s remark), I would feel uncomfortable that she did not join us at the table and that she would wait on us even after a full day of work at her salaried job. Mother would serve herself only when we had no more unmet needs for her to attend to. In all fairness, however, both to my father and to the child I was, we did protest. Even my father, who took it for granted that kitchen work was women’s work, was uneasy with my mother’s refusal to sit with us and enjoy the food into which she poured so much effort. Still our protest was a paltry one. We never expected to, nor probably did we want to, curb her excess of altruism, and it was easier and surely more convenient to have her do it her way.

The discomfort we felt suggested that my mother’s enigmatic pronouncement was implicitly understood, although I had to become an adult woman to understand the quiet vehemence that underlay the good humor. As a woman, I had to experience for myself the ambivalence with which so many women view our socially assigned role. It is an ambivalence that attaches to the joy we garner when we watch another thrive under our loving ministrations. The ambivalence is born of the desire to fulfil a vision of ourselves as good only when we attend to the needs of others, while failing to understand why others do not regard it as equally imperative to respond to us in a similar manner.

At the time I was trying to understand the relation of current feminist writings to conceptions of equality, I was struck by another version of the same expression I had remembered from those childhood dinners. A friend and I were listening to then Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, counter Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment. My friend had been a governess, a position that made her especially vulnerable to an employer’s unwanted sexual attentions. While we were listening to Thomas with a sceptical ear, she remarked that as much as she wanted the truth exposed it was not her desire, nor did she think it was Hill’s desire, to see Thomas publicly pilloried. “After all,” she said, “he, too, was some mother’s child.”

My friend’s cultural background was very different from my mother’s and I was struck by the use of such a similar trope. Its meaning was clear in this context. Whatever he himself had done, there was someone who had cared for him, but was not to be blamed for his misdeeds; someone for whom his well-being and happiness were of central importance, who would be suffering if she were to witness his public disgrace. The empathy to Hill was also extended to Thomas, not directly (for he was thought blameworthy), but through his mother. The iconic representation of this fundamental connection between a mothering person and the fate of the individual she has mothered is located in the figure of the Mater Dolorosa where the suffering of Christ is imaged through the suffering of Mary. Although invoking universals is out of favor with progressive politics today, there seems to be something telling in the widespread appeal of this image and of the cross-cultural use of the figure of “some mother’s child.” The notion speaks to the relationship, forged through the care of a vulnerable dependent, and to the value that this relationship imparts both to the one cared for and to the caregiver. This relationship is ubiquitous in human society and is as fundamental to our humanity as any property philosophers have invoked as distinctly human.

In considering equality from the perspective of feminism’s critique of the individualism and male-centeredness of the ideal as articulated in liberal philosophy, I came to recognize that the locutions “I am also a mother’s child” or “He, too, is some mother’s child” can be heard as “We are all—equally—some mother’s child.” And herein lies a claim to equality, one that is an alternative to conceptions which dominate discourse in liberal political theory. It is a claim with both moral and political consequences. Unlike most all conceptions of equality, it begins not with an individual (recall Shylock) asserting characteristics that pertain to him as an individual (“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”) and entitle him to equal status (“fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is”). Philosophical theories of equality are more likely to begin with our property as rational beings rather than as possessors of organs and passions, but the effect is identical. By virtue of some common property that we possess as individuals, we make claims to equal treatment, welfare, opportunity, resources, social goods, or capabilities.² To have hands, organs, a vulnerability to hunger and pain, or to be rational, are properties that an individual possesses by virtue of who that individual is. Instead my mother asserted her equality by invoking a property that she has only in virtue of a property another person has. She is the child of a mother only because another person is (or was) someone who mothered her.

By plumbing the depths of this bit of maternal wisdom, I had hoped to come up with a feminist understanding of equality and thereby resolve the quandary of a feminism—itself the spawn of the Enlightenment ideal of equality—compelled to criticize its self-originating conception. After several years, I feel less certain that I have a new concept of equality to articulate. Nevertheless, I do think that by considering how being a mother’s child gives one a claim to equality we see the contours of a new notion. Yes, the statement identifies a similarity between all persons, but not every similarity between humans will serve as a basis for the moral and political claim to equality. An answer to the question of whether this shared relation can serve as a basis of a moral and political claim to equality will be deferred until we look more closely at the relationship which the mother-child relation so often exemplifies, but does not exhaust: the relationship between a dependent and her caregiver.

We Can’t Go Out the Same Door We Came In

Writing from her situation as a white middle-class woman having experienced divorce, Mary Ann Mason (1988) concludes:

A family with children is not an egalitarian arrangement but a mutual-support society where all the members, children and father as well as mother, depend upon one another for emotional support and physical protection from the outside world. The degree of each member’s contribution varies with age and over time, but nobody keeps score. (Mason 1988, 15)

This nonegalitarian and gendered social arrangement sits nested within a political and economic arrangement which distributes rights and freedoms to those who participate in the public political and economic order.

Mason’s vision presumes much. It presumes that the one who ventures into the outside world is treated as an equal with those outside the home, that the home is in fact protective for all within it, and that the structure of the family within the home is heterosexual. All these presumptions are in need of critical scrutiny. But let us, for the moment, limit ourselves to the rhetoric of equality—for the rhetoric of the public order is equality even if its realization with respect to non-gendered, as well as gendered, issues is imperfect.

While the ideal of equality itself is vested in the ideal of the moral and political integrity of each individual, Mason’s lesson is that, although we may today enter a marriage as individuals, we cannot go out the same door we came in—especially if we are women, and most especially if we are women with children.

The gender asymmetry in this situation is crucial. It derives from the gender asymmetry in the division of labor. It is true that men, especially when they become fathers, get assigned the role of breadwinner—whether or not they choose it and whether or not they belong to a social class that gives them a range of possibilities for carrying out this responsibility. Given a breadwinner’s responsibilities, it seems that neither can men go out the same door they came in. Most men assume their responsibilities, but so many abandon them. We want to understand why the sense of commitment that attaches to motherhood seems not to be as deep and pervasive a psychic change for the men who abandon their families and their obligations as provider. How much force can the obligation to provide for their children have in the moral consciousness of the men who abandon these responsibilities, even as they assume them for a second family? Perhaps the difference between men and women is found in the perception that while the caregiver is not fungible, the breadwinner is. Perhaps psychosexual differences,³ or differences in the depth of socialization for parenting account for the disparity. The same apparent motivations for abandoning a child—the love of another, the call of a profession, the despondency at difficult conditions, the despair at not being able to properly provide for one’s child—are construed in dramatically different ways in the case of a woman versus the case of a man.⁴ This gender asymmetry pertains across different classes and social situations—although under conditions of extreme need, even women are excused from their caretaking responsibilities, but only if they can hand over the child to one better able to provide sustenance.⁵

Except perhaps in dire conditions where expectations and assignments of responsibility alter, once a woman has a child—whether the child is conceived within or outside a marriage—she is no longer the individual she was before. (Dorothy Parker is said to have commented, “The trouble with having children is that once you have them, you have them.”) Even the individual that she was before was shaped by the expectation that women take on the role of caregiver within the family. This expectation, modified through class, ethnicity, and race, shapes much of the economic reality women encounter outside the family and most of the roles they assume within it. That reality is marked by the responsibility—assumed or imposed—to care for dependents.

The aspiration of equality reaches to each individual’s sense of integrity and self-respect. To this extent, it is an aspiration that cannot, or ought not, be abandoned. But to the degree that equality is tied to a particular conception of society, one in which persons are bound together by voluntarily chosen obligations assumed for mutual benefit and self-interest, society cannot begin to comprehend the difficulties and dilemmas created by the facts of human dependency. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, it is a picture that holds us captive. The bonds of a human society tie not only those who can voluntarily obligate themselves and who are equally situated to benefit from mutual cooperation. Dependents are not in such a position, nor are those who must care for dependents. And as long as the responsibilities for human dependency fall disproportionately on women, an equality so construed will disproportionately fail women in their aspirations.

If we begin our thinking not with persons as they are individuated nor with the properties that pertain to them as individuals, their rationality and their interests, but with persons as they are in connections of care and concern, we consider commonalities that characterize this relatedness. These would form the basis of a connection-based equality rather than the individual-based equality more familiar to us. The question for a connection-based equality is not: What rights are due me by virtue of my status as an equal, such that these rights are consistent with those of all other individuals who have the status of an equal? Instead, the question is: What are my responsibilities to others with whom I stand in specific relations and what are the responsibilities of others to me, so that I can be well cared for and have my needs addressed even as I care for and respond to the needs of those who depend on me?

The basis for such a reconceptualization rests on the centrality of dependency in human relations, the impact of the vulnerabilities of dependency on moral obligation, and the repercussions of these moral obligations on social and political organization. Dependency, as a feature of the human condition, has a crucial bearing on the ordering of social institutions and on the moral intuitions that serve to guarantee adherence to just institutions. Theories of justice, as Hume understood and Rawls underscored, are shaped by the circumstances of human existence that make justice both needed and attainable. A moderate scarcity of resources is such a circumstance because any social order is partially a response to some degree of scarcity. Yet it is equally clear that no society will continue beyond one generation if there are not persons who care for the young. No society—save those enduring the harshest economic, geographic, or climatic conditions⁶—can remain decent if some do not attend to the needs of the ill or disabled and the frail elderly as well as the young. Many moral theories can be and have been used to justify such moral obligations both of society as a whole and of particular individuals, but the obligations owed to those who give care, who attend to dependency, have not figured in moral, political or judicial discussions. At once sentimentalized and despised, dependency work has been unevenly distributed among genders, and even among women. The occlusion of dependency work combines with the inattention to dependency workers to make our obligations to those in need of care part of a system of exploitation,⁷one which diminishes the moral worth of the caregiver as well as the person cared for. A society in which such a system of exploitation is the norm cannot be said to be a society in which equality, as both a moral and social value, thrives.

To understand the demands of dependency work ...