2024-2 Feminist Ethics
Brake, Elizabeth (2020) "Care as Work. The Exploitation of Caring Attitudes and Emotional Labor." Caring for Liberalism. Routledge.
Introduction: Care, Value, and Work
Care is a great good. It is also a source of special vulnerabilities [취약성], especially as a form of labor, both paid and unpaid. How can liberalism address these complexities of caring relations, particularly when vulnerabilities of care arise from apparently free choices?
Care is a special case of the problem of exploitation, of one class appropriating the products of the labor of others to the detriment [손상] of the workers. One classic Marxist criticism of liberalism is that liberalism cannot explain the injustice of exploitation. If workers choose to work, it appears that liberalism must respect the terms on which they choose to work – never mind that choice, in this context, is illusory or not morally meaningful. Catharine MacKinnon famously applied this analysis to women’s subordination (MacKinnon 1987, 60). Not only do women make choices in a context of limited options and social and economic pressures, women come to want what is not in their self-interest through gender socialization. For example, women come to eroticize the submissiveness associated with femininity in patriarchy. On MacKinnon’s analysis, men and women are classes parallel to the classes of capitalists and proletariats in Marxism, with men exploiting women’s sexuality. What if such an analysis also applies to care – that is, that limited options and social and economic pressures shape women’s caregiving choices and that gender socialization leads women to value care, against their own interests, facilitating their exploitation?
This might seem wrong-headed. After all, as noted at the outset, caring and being cared for are great goods and so appear to be in people’s interests. Indeed, caregiving is a source of self-esteem and of pleasure for many women. But like sexuality, caregiving and caring are shaped by limited options, social pressures, and gender socialization. [215]
Before proceeding, we should distinguish three types of care.
① material caretaking – taking care of physical and material needs.
② emotional caring labor or emotional support.
③ attitudinal care, or subjectively experienced benevolent attention and concern.
Both material caretaking and emotional labor can take place independently of attitudinal caring, as when performed by a stranger. Attitudinally caring relationships conceptually need not involve material caretaking or emotional labor, but usually do. My argument concerns all three distinct kinds of care, distinguishing between them as needed. For brevity, I will refer to attitudinally caring relationships as “caring relationships” in this chapter, although “caring relationships” could also refer to relationships of material or emotional caregiving lacking attitudinal care.
In this chapter, I will provide a liberal analysis of the exploitation of women’s care [216]. Women provide more material care for children, the elderly, and for material needs in the home, and this inequitable distribution of labor has long been a cause of concern for feminists (Okin 1989; Brake 2016). But the exploitation of material caregiving labor within the household, through the gendered division of labor, is only part of this analysis. I want to extend the analysis, more controversially, to the less recognized division of emotional labor and to the formation of caring attitudes themselves.
Women are socialized to perform emotional labor – maintaining relationships, attending to feelings – and to identify themselves with caregiving roles, more so than men. Women, more so than men, are socialized to care and to base their identities on caring (Bartky 1990, 99–119). This asymmetry is crucial to the exploitation of care, just as the construction of gendered desire is crucial to the exploitation of sexuality on MacKinnon’s analysis. [216]
Because care and caring relationships are goods, it may be difficult to see the harm in the gendered inculcation [설득함] of caring attitudes – more difficult than in the case of gendered sexual desire. Indeed, if men’s socialization to be less caring deprives them of caring relationships, they are harmed by virtue of this socialization. But this may be true while it is also true that the disparity in caregiving – where one group is socialized to provide care, and another to receive it – has distinctive harms for the care providers.
My task here is twofold: to analyze the nature of the injustice of this gendered distribution of care within liberal theory and to argue that liberalism can address this exploitation by treating care as work. Breaking down legal boundaries between work and care will help protect carers’ special vulnerabilities. Conceptualizing care as work grounds my argument for economic and labor protections for unpaid caregivers. This is not to deny that care is also a great good; I am not claiming that it is merely work.
This chapter should be read in the context of a series of essays I have written, which argue that a liberal state should support care, both caring relationships and material caregiving (Brake 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2018). This chapter is, in particular, the companion to another paper that challenges the dichotomy between care and work (Brake 2018). This dichotomy obscures the special vulnerabilities that arise for paid caregivers as carers and for unpaid caregivers as workers. Thinking of care as work will increase the law’s ability to protect caregivers, paid and unpaid.
In the companion paper (Brake 2018), I focused on the distinctive vulnerabilities of paid care workers. Care gives rise to special vulnerabilities in paid as well as unpaid care. Law professor Naomi Schoenbaum has argued that law fails to recognize that in intimate work, the “relationship generates value but also vulnerability” (Schoenbaum 2015, 5). For example, the relationship itself can be terminated against both parties’ wills if the care worker is transferred or terminated. When this happens, not only may the worker lose the valuable relationship, she may also lose the value of the intimate knowledge she has gained, which allows her to do her job well. Law should recognize paid caregivers’ distinct vulnerabilities as carers (whose valuable relationships may need protection) and as workers (whose care work relies on a special body of intimate knowledge) (Brake 2018).
In this chapter, I focus on the distinctive vulnerabilities of unpaid care workers. As the companion paper argues that we should recognize the overlap between paid care work and care in law, this chapter argues that we should recognize the overlap between unpaid care work and work in law.
We should see unpaid material and emotional caregiving as work. Attitudinal caring is not only compatible with work but it can be manipulated to exploit workers. Caregiving is (among other things) work, and work which is disproportionately extracted from women, and the state can address this by treating it like work. [217]
In what follows, I first outline the problem of the exploitation of unpaid caregiving. I then argue that liberalism has the theoretical resources to address such exploitation. Then, I present a proposal for legal measures to address it within an ideal liberal egalitarian state. Finally, I address two theoretical objections.
These arguments draw on feminist analysis of gender inequality, care ethics, and liberal egalitarianism. Together, these approaches suggest that care is valuable and that its value has been neglected. Susan Moller Okin (1989) argued that care has been ignored in political thought and relegated [좌천되다] to the private sphere outside the scope of justice. This prevented political philosophy from addressing women’s inequality. But care is a matter of justice because its distribution affects equal opportunity for women and children and because care is a good that the state should support. I argue that subsuming care under norms of justice can protect the vulnerable, especially women who perform care. Protecting care, and recognizing carers’ special vulnerabilities, has profound importance for migrant women, women of color, and worse-off women, who perform a disproportionate amount of paid, and arguably unpaid, care. Protecting care also affects people with disabilities who rely on care workers. A theory of care is integral to a full account of justice (Kittay 1999; Held 2006).
The Problem: Unpaid Caregiving, Material and Emotional
It is well recognized that unpaid caregiving within the family is a source of economic vulnerability. Okin famously documented the “cycle of vulnerability,” which arises when women downgrade their own economic pursuits in anticipation of marriage or after marriage and in order to be primary caregivers in the family; when women are coupled with men, this typically leads to increasing economic and power inequality between the two (Okin 1989, 142–169). In different-sex marriages or partnerships, women’s devoting more time and energy to caregiving for children (or elderly parents or other dependents) can lead to their earning less than their male partners. This gendered division of labor is also found in women’s overseeing the fulfillment of material needs (food, clean clothes and housing, comfort) of another independent adult (such as a husband). Economic inequalities tend to diminish the decision-making power, within the marriage, of the economically dependent partner, who is typically female. The gendered division of labor also affects unmarried and unpartnered women, including single mothers or coparents, women caring for elderly parents or other dependents, and women expected to perform unpaid caring labor (not part of their job description) in professional contexts. It affects all women insofar as girls are socialized into expecting to assume gendered caregiving roles.
Another aspect of the gendered division of labor is less well-recognized. The emotional labor, or support, involved in caregiving, in the case of both paid and unpaid caregivers, is also a source of vulnerability. Susan Maushart has called this emotional labor “wifework” – not simply providing housework and material care but caring for a male partner’s emotional needs, listening to him, comforting him, and laughing at his jokes. She writes: “Wifework includes what Virginia Woolf called ‘reflecting a man at twice his normal size’” (Maushart 2001, 10–11; see discussion in Brake 2012, 116). Within different-sex relationships, attention to emotions and maintaining wider social and familial relationships tend to be distributed along gender lines (Bartky 1990, 99–119). Women tend to be socialized into caring roles from an early age and to develop caring attitudes that facilitate their performance of emotional labor. Again, this affects all women, and not only married or partnered women, through gender role socialization, and also when women are expected to perform the bulk of emotional labor in professional contexts (where it is not part of their job description) or social settings.
In an analysis of the “gendered imbalance in the provision of emotional support,” Sandra Bartky describes the nature of emotional support: “to offer him comfort, typically by the bandaging of his emotional wounds or to offer him sustenance, typically by the feeding of his self-esteem.” This is done in order “to produce or to maintain in the one supported and sustained a conviction of the value and importance of his own chosen projects, hence of the value and importance of his own person.” The support is given through speech, body language, and attentive listening and interjection (Bartky 1990, 102).
Bartky argues that this imbalance of emotional support and sustenance is exploitative. Drawing on Ann Ferguson, she writes, “men’s appropriation of women’s emotional labor is a species of exploitation akin in important respects to the exploitation of workers under capitalism” (Bartky 1990, 100, citing Ferguson 1989, chapter 4). Ferguson intends this as exploitation in the Marxist sense: “a taking advantage in which A’s profiting from his relationship to B involves substantial damage to B’s interests,” or an unequal exchange that “bring[s] about the systematic disempowerment [권한박탈, 무력화] of one party” (Bartky 1990, 101). The damage or disempowerment condition distinguishes it from gifts from a richer person to a poorer person, or between family members, where the unequal exchange is not damaging or disempowering.
One qualification is important: this account of the harms of inequitably exchanged care applies to relationships between independent adults. It does not apply to child- and elder care, which involves dependents who cannot reciprocate [회답하다]. Care that cannot be reciprocated will not undermine self-respect in the same way that unreciprocated care between independent adults will (a point I will elaborate in the following). It is important to recognize the widespread fact of dependency care; in neglecting dependency care, liberalism neglected important facts of human existence (Kittay 1999; Held 2006). It also obscured the injustice of the inequitable gendered distribution of dependency care, which undermines women’s equal opportunity and distributes significant burdens of social cooperation unfairly (Brake 2016; Okin 1989).
However, there is a specific injustice that arises in imbalanced or inequitable caring relationships between independent adults. These are relationships in which one partner gives much more care than the other, and so receives much less care in return. While Okin focused on marriage or marriage-like relationships, such imbalanced care can also arise between adults in friendships or social and professional settings. It can also arise at the borders of dependency care, in care for older children and the elderly, if they are able to reciprocate care but do not. There is also a connection between women’s socialization as caregivers for dependents and their exploitation as carers in relationships between adults. Gender socialization encourages caring in both contexts.
Now, this analysis of the harm of imbalanced caring relationships faces the objection that caring relationships are a good, and habits of sympathetic listening and attention are valuable to their possessors. Thus, regarding caring relationships as harmful or disempowering might seem misguided, even if they are imbalanced. After all, caring relationships are a strong determinant [결정요인] of mental health and self-respect or self-esteem (Brake 2012, 176–178; Brake 2017, 138; Perlman 2007). Surely the opportunity to engage in them benefits women, and men are burdened by the culture of masculinity, which impedes their developing or expressing caring attitudes. However, caring (or ostensibly caring, or once-caring) relationships that are abusive, high-conflict, or incorporate other problematic aspects can be damaging (Perlman 2007, 13–14). This will apply to at least some exploitative relationships.
Moreover, even if some – or many – exploitative caring relationships are valuable qua caring relationships, the fact that caring relationships are valuable does not entail that imbalanced caring relationships can not also be disempowering, or even damaging. Nor does it mean that work within these relationships, whether material or emotional, cannot be exploited or that caring attitudes cannot be used to extract caring behavior. As MacKinnon writes of heterosexuality:
would you agree, as people say about heterosexuality, that a worker chooses to work? . . . If working conditions improve, would you call that worker not oppressed? If . . . you even like your work, or have a good day at work, does that mean, from a marxist perspective, your work is not exploited? (MacKinnon 1987, 60–61)
The exploitative harm or disempowerment arising from unequal exchange can occur in contexts that also have value.
In paid contexts, emotional labor is recognized as work. As Bartky discusses, Arlie Hochschild has documented how flight attendants are required to perform emotional labor and display caring behavior. Flight attendants are instructed “to smile steadily and lay down around them selves an atmosphere of warmth, cheerfulness, and friendly attention,” managing their own feelings as well as the passengers’ (Bartky 1990, 104, cites Hochschild 1983, see also 2013). Emotional labor is performed, as part of the job, in other professions – in the service industry and by therapists. (As I mentioned earlier, it can also be performed in any work involving human interaction, even in cases where it is not part of the job description.) Once we see that emotional labor is a type of work, we can see that this work can be exploited and that caring attitudes can be used to extract it.
An objector might respond that even if imbalanced caring or emotional labor would be exploitative, in fact “traditional” husbands do reciprocate care and emotional labor, even if not, to the same extent, in kind. Men show their attentiveness by gestures such as Valentine’s gifts or elaborate proposals (as an audience member remarked in one presentation of this chapter, “men do reciprocate – they bring flowers!”). But occasional gifts are not equivalent, in emotional support, to sustained and daily attention and concern.
The kernel [알맹이, 핵심] of truth in this traditionalist response is that in many male female relationships, men and women may express care differently due to gender socialization. It is compatible with claiming that women systematically tend to provide more care than men to recognize that some men do provide care, including performing emotional labor. Men’s care can be exploited too, as can care between same-sex friends or partners. But the point that some men express their care through providing economic support or gifts does not show that women’s providing more emotional care is not exploitative.
The traditionalist objection is that women’s emotional labor and care are reciprocated economically – men provide economic support in return for emotional support and caring labor. This can be seen as a specialized division of labor. This objection, however, does not take into account that the majority of married women also work outside the home for pay and that – as Bartky points out – single women in dating relationships provide emotional support without economic reciprocation (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Bartky 1990, 102, 110, 118). Women in social and professional settings may also be expected to perform uncompensated emotional labor.
But there is a deeper problem with this objection. As Bartky argues, women’s unreciprocated (or greatly under-reciprocated) emotional labor in intimate male-female relationships disempowers women (Bartky 1990, 111–113). This disempowerment differs from that of those who perform emotional labor without attitudinal care, such as flight attendants. According to Hochschild, such performance risks a sense of inauthenticity and a loss of emotional authenticity in other contexts; while we might debate the concept of “authenticity” philosophically, such felt experience can contribute to poor mental health, as Hochschild documented with flight attendants (Bartky 1990, 104; Hochschild 1983, 131). But Bartky argues that there is another risk of unreciprocated emotional labor performed with attitudinal care: such labor risks a loss of self. [221] Caring attitudes may lead the carer to take on the other’s perspective as her own. When emotional labor is imbalanced and sincerely caring, it feeds the man’s sense of self at the cost of the woman’s. Bartky argues that unreciprocated engrossment [전념, 몰두] in a male partner’s concerns may corrode the caregiver’s own perspective, her sense of self, and the importance of her commitments. This corrosion is why, according to Bartky, imbalanced caring meets the damage or disempowerment condition of exploitation.
Of course, unreciprocated emotional labor can also be corrosive in same-sex relationships, friendships, and caregiving for those on the borderline of dependency, such as teenagers; but gender socialization likely makes it more prevalent in male-female relationships. Moreover, male female relationships typically involve multiple forms of power inequality, such as differences in strength; hierarchies associated with gender roles (such as the eroticization of dominance and submission); and, in male breadwinner [생계를 책임지는 사람] families, economic dependence. These pressures intensify vulnerability and make it likely that imbalanced care is more disempowering in male-female relationships.
Imbalanced caregiving and the special vulnerabilities it creates are a problem of power. Just as patriarchal power is constituted and maintained by the exploitation of female sexuality, as MacKinnon argued, patriarchal power is also constituted and maintained by the exploitation of care (MacKinnon 1989; Ferguson 1989; discussed in Bartky 1990, 100–102). Just as, for MacKinnon, sexuality forms an intimate part of the identity of the oppressed, which is taken from them, caring forms an intimate part of many women’s identities, yet this very identification facilitates the exploitative extraction of care through the cultivation of caring attitudes. Just as sexual objectification marks women as inferiors, as MacKinnon argued, when women’s attention and care is trained on men’s needs without (significant) reciprocation, it marks women as inferiors, elevating men’s values, goals, and commitments over women’s.
The imbalanced inculcation [설득함] of caring attitudes and identification as caregivers disempowers women. The gendered construction of dispositions and identities is part of what makes exploitation possible, as women are trained to put someone else’s needs first – and men are not. This gendered distribution of caring attitudes and identities leads to imbalanced care in male-female relationships. Again, this parallels MacKinnon’s account of the construction of desire and its role in maintaining patriarchal power: “how do women come to want that which is not in our interest? . . . I think that sexual desire in women, at least in this culture, is socially constructed as that by which we come to want our own self-annihilation” (MacKinnon 1987, 54). The inculcation of caring attitudes, likewise, may lead women to put their interests last.
This analysis of patriarchal power is drawn from Marxist and radical feminism. Indeed, not only do MacKinnon, Ferguson, and Bartky explicitly draw on Marx, Bartky cites radical feminist Shulamith Firestone in the epigraph of her essay, suggesting that patriarchy is “parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity” (Bartky 1990, 99, citing Firestone 1971, 127).
Radical feminism has criticized liberal feminism as unable to address such problems of power. Imbalanced caring appears to be paradigmatically part of the liberal private sphere, subject to free choice among consenting adults. Unreciprocated emotional labor in adult caring relationships and the gendered imbalance in the inculcation of caring attitudes appear to be resistant to any form of interference by the liberal state on principle – yet they are crucial to the exploitation of care [222-223].
A Liberal Critique of Exploited Care
I will argue that liberalism does have resources to address the problem of exploited care and emotional labor. In earlier work I have argued that liberalism has reason to promote caring broadly, including inculcating caring attitudes in men and women. In this section, I briefly recapitulate that argument; then I offer further argument to show that liberalism, while promoting care, should also address the gendered asymmetry in caring attitudes.
In earlier work, I argued that caring relationships and material care are goods that a politically liberal state should support. The main hurdle to justifying any support for caring relationships within political liberalism is showing that their value does not depend on appeal to a particular conception of the good. I argued that ① supporting caring relationships and material care is compatible with the neutrality principle (which holds that the state should remain neutral between conceptions of the good found in comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrines, excepting any conflicting with justice) (Rawls 1993, 190–195).
On my view, ② material care and caring relationships are what Rawls would call a “primary good,” part of the “thin theory of the good” (Brake 2012, 173–181, 2017). The liberal state can, and should, support caring relationships by providing a set of marriage-like legal entitlements, which protect such relationships within certain institutional contexts. Because care is valuable in any kind of caring relationship, the amatonormative [낭만적인 관계를 소중히 여기는] privileging of monogamous [일부일처제의] marriage – that is, the special treatment given to romantic, sexual couples – is unjust. As a matter of justice, support for caring relationships cannot be restricted to romantic sexual relationships or even to couples. ③ The state should distribute these legal and social bases of caring relationships equally, due to the primary good status of caring relationships. ④ I argued that these bases of caring relationships also include educational curricula, infrastructure [사회기반시설] allowing the elderly access to social interactions, and state promotion of caring relationships. I have also argued that the state should support material caregiving, on grounds of equal opportunity (Brake 2017). ⑤ Equal opportunity requires that we all receive material caregiving as children and sometimes throughout our lives; women’s equal opportunity requires that this labor be distributed fairly.
① 돌봄관계와 물질적 돌봄에 대한 지원은 중립 원칙을 위배하지 않음.
② 돌봄관계와 물질적 돌봄은 Primary good임.
③ 돌봄관계가 primary good의 지위를 지니기 때문에, 그것은 공평하게 분배되어야 함.
④ 돌봄관계에 대한 기반은 사회적 상호작용에 대한 노인들의 접근을 허용하는 교육 커리큘럼, 사회기반 시설 등을 포함함
⑤ 물질적 돌봄 역시 동등하게 기회가 주여져야 함.
My arguments for the value of caring relationships and material care entail that the state should not “level down” care in order to address the gendered asymmetry of caring attitudes and imbalanced caring relationships. A state in which men and women cared equally, but very little, would not be better; it would be worse-off in an important primary good. However, the fact that a liberal state has reason to support and promote caring broadly does not entail that it must address the gendered asymmetry in caring behavior and attitudes. A state that promotes caring could still have significant inequality.
Thus, further argument is needed to show why the gendered asymmetry is unjust. [224]
My arguments that ① caring relationships are valuable suggest one reason: to the extent that social institutions deprive them of caring relationships, men are worse-off. This could be the case if men are less prone to develop caring relationships with friends, or even with children and extended family, due to their gender socialization. And even if men receive care from women in male-female relationships, a limited ability to care may make the relationship less valuable to them than it would otherwise be. This is an injustice to men in the distribution of this primary good. However, we must be careful. My position does not entail that an economically struggling single mother is better-off than a wealthy child free single man, simply because she has more caring relationships – with children, and with friends. Other primary goods matter too, and even when considering care, we have to see its burdens as well as its benefits.
The central injustice of the exploitation of care is that one group of people is taking care from another group of people, to their detriment. ② What they are taking is work – unpaid work, and work not even recognized as work. The solution, then, which may at first seem surprising, is to address this exploitation by recognizing and valuing care as work. One reason this may seem strange is that care is subjectively valued by many people more than work. Caregiving and caring relationships are often attributed an intrinsic value, whereas work is sometimes seen as a burden or as primarily instrumentally valuable. However, I will argue that extending worker protections (which a just liberal society should incorporate) to unpaid care workers (as well as to paid care workers) is both justified and a way to address the problem of exploitation.
The challenge for liberalism, from the feminist perspective, is to show the injustice in the gendered division of caring attitudes and emotional labor. The gendered division of childcare and housework has been criticized as undermining women’s equal opportunity (Okin 1989). As the family is part of what Rawls calls the “basic structure” of society, which is the subject of justice, the legal institution of the family should be designed to protect equal opportunity. But explaining the injustice of the gendered distribution of caring attitudes and emotional labor seems more challenging than explaining the injustice of the gendered division of domestic work. This is because the harms of the exploitation of emotional caring labor (through the gendered distribution of caring attitudes) are more difficult to observe and quantify. Yet, if the exploitation of emotional labor and caring attitudes is key to women’s oppression, an analysis of the injustice is crucial.
My analysis builds on my previous arguments for the value of caring relationships within the thin theory of the good. In brief, this value consists in their close connection to mental health and to “perhaps the most important primary good” of self-respect (Rawls 1999, 386; Brake 2012, 176–178). Here I extend those arguments by considering the relation of care work, particularly emotional labor, to self-respect (while I primarily have unpaid care work in mind, the arguments also apply to cases of paid care work in which the caregiver acts with unreciprocated attitudinal care). If Bartky’s empirical hypothesis about the effects of unreciprocated, attitudinally caring emotional labor on self-respect is correct, the effects on self-respect provide reason for addressing the lack of reciprocation within Rawlsian liberalism – that is, so far as the lack of reciprocation is the product of institutions.
Rawls’s argument for the importance of self-respect or self-esteem is that it underpins a sense of the importance of one’s own projects. And recognizing the importance of one’s own projects (or believing society will see them as valuable) is a condition of pursuing them at all. This is why, according to Rawls, self-respect is “perhaps the most important primary good” – because it is normally needed for pursuing one’s conception of the good (Rawls 1999, 386; see also Brake 2013; Stark 2012). [225]
Bartky’s analysis of the effects of unreciprocated emotional labor resembles – in the negative – Rawls’s account of the importance of self respect. Bartky writes that the
sincerity and quality of heartfelt concern that a woman brings to her man’s emotional needs serves to reinforce in her own mind the importance of his little dramas of daily life. But . . . by failing to attend to her in the same way she attends to him, he confirms for her and, just as importantly, for himself, her inferior position in the hierarchy of gender. (Bartky 1990, 109)
Inequitable emotional labor enacts a status hierarchy; when it is rooted in caring attitudes, it risks the carer internalizing this hierarchy. Bartky describes an epistemic “risk that that the woman will accept uncritically ‘the world according to him’ and that she will have corresponding difficulty in the construction of the world according to herself” (Bartky 1990, 111). She describes a corresponding ethical risk: “To affirm a man’s sense of reality is at the same time to affirm his values” (Bartky 1990, 112). This may in particular lead women to keep quiet, to keep the peace, in areas of gender conflict – for example, in discussion of sexual harassment, #metoo, and sexual consent.
In Rawlsian terms, unreciprocated care may prevent the carer from recognizing the importance of her own projects. It may have the opposite effect for the beneficiary of emotional support. Bartky’s description of these benefits again echoes Rawls’s account of the importance of self respect: the effect of receiving emotional support is “to produce or to maintain in the one supported and sustained a conviction of the value and importance of his own chosen projects, hence of the value and importance of his own person” (Bartky 1990, 102). [225-226]
Rawls assumes that freedom of association and relative socioeconomic equality will suffice to protect self-respect. As I have noted elsewhere, this reasoning is faulty, because people might not have access to a community of others who support their self-respect (Brake 2013). If reciprocated attitudinally caring emotional labor is a condition of self-respect, there is reason for the state to promote it, or at least its legal and social bases. This could be done by educational curricula focused on caring skills. It could also be done by public recognition of the value of emotional labor and the risk to self-respect of providing unreciprocated attitudinally caring emotional labor.
Before proceeding, I should address an objection. It might be said that, in some cases of unreciprocated attitudinally caring emotional labor, such labor is the woman’s chosen project. By emotionally supporting her husband and taking on his projects as her own, she pursues her conception of the good. Certainly, taking on another’s projects as one’s own – benevolence – is not intrinsically corrosive to self-respect. The response here must turn on the hypothesis that long-term subordination of one’s interests and needs to those of another has epistemic and ethical risks: the loss of one’s own perspective and values (Bartky 1990; Hill 1973).
The risks of imbalanced emotional labor suggest a more nuanced account of why the liberal state should address the imbalanced inculcation of caring attitudes and unreciprocated emotional labor. Caring relationships are primary goods insofar as they support self-respect. As primary goods, the state has reason to distribute their social and legal bases equally. But caring relationships support self-respect more or less (or not at all) based on the extent of reciprocation. If so, the asymmetry in caring attitudes and emotional labor produces an asymmetry in the primary good of self-respect-supporting caring relationships. Insofar as its distribution is affected by the basic structure, the state can modify the basic structure for a more equitable distribution.
While the state can distribute material caregiving for dependents, it cannot directly distribute the attitudinally caring emotional labor constitutive of caring relationships, as people cannot develop attitudinal caring on demand. At best, it can promote it through modifying the basic structure. One example of such a modification is an educational curriculum focused on teaching caring skills to all. Another is through creating positions that honor care work, such as a prestigious “Care Corps” along the lines of Teach for America (Brake 2017; Robeyns 2011; Nussbaum 2006, 213). In the following, I will propose another way of protecting against the inequitable distribution of emotional labor. First, one further point about the resources of liberalism to address the problem of exploitation.
One aspect of the Marxist critique of exploitation is that ideology facilitates our exploitation by shaping our desires. The Marxist critique suggests that liberalism cannot address such ideological transmissions because they are protected by liberties of speech, conscience, and association. But in fact, gendered socialization of attitudinal caring and emotional labor falls within the remit [소관] of liberal justice. It does so insofar as the basic structure shapes our desires (for instance, through education replicating gender norms) and limits our options (for instance, by making it difficult to combine work and childcare, or through tax policy). Insofar as the basic structure shapes our desires through education and through constraining our options, it shapes the distribution of caring, and this can be remedied.
This point also distinguishes gendered imbalanced caring from imbalanced caring that arises unsystematically outside the basic structure. For example, people in anxious-avoidant [회피성의] attachment relationships (characterized by one partner seeking connection, the other avoiding it) may experience imbalanced caring, but this does not fall within the remit of justice (assuming, plausibly, that attachment styles are not produced by the basic structure). The nature of the injustice is the unequal distribution of the social and legal bases of self-respect and relational goods produced by the basic structure. More succinctly, the distribution is unjust insofar as the basic structure maintains the gender system. A similar point could be made about hierarchies of race and class, insofar as practices of deference or status corrosive to self-respect are motivated and maintained by the basic structure. Exploited caregiving (paid and unpaid) is linked to race and class, as well as gender, both in terms of those who perform the bulk of paid care work and in terms of racialized expectations regarding the performance of care and emotional labor. So far as these hierarchies of race, class, and gender emerge from the basic structure, they are injustices. But if imbalance arises unsystematically from outside the basic structure, due to quirks [기벽] of individual psychology (as in the anxious-avoidant relationship), it is not within the remit of justice. If everyone were primed to care, and care work was not imbalanced due to institutional pressures, it would no longer be exploitative.
Proposal
Earlier I suggested two ways to address the problem of imbalanced caring: education and a Care Corps. Here is another proposal: regulate and recognize care – including material and emotional labor – as work from a legal point of view. Simply put, treat imbalanced care in marriage or long-term partnerships as work – and subject to worker protections such as minimum wage, overtime, sick leave, unjust termination, and health and safety regulations. Protections for paid care workers should extend to unpaid care workers.
Such protections could involve educational and public health interventions to protect against the effects of unreciprocated caring – just as workplace signs remind workers to wear safety equipment, so the state might warn against the risks of imbalanced emotional labor. These interventions might extend to promoting reciprocal, “safer,” caring. Moreover, legally recognizing unpaid care as work might encourage unpaid caregivers to claim reciprocation as their due, or even to unionize [노동조합을 결성하다]. Seeing care as work, legally and socially, might shift both men’s and women’s perceptions of desert – by thinking in terms of the caregiver’s right to breaks and other protections.
In principle, care work could even figure into a claim for compensation on relationship dissolution. On this model, when two competent adults enter a long-term relationship of imbalanced caregiving, including friendships, they would be treated as having agreed to certain legally binding terms (compare Chambers 2017, 157, 159, 189, 202). Presumably, in an ongoing relationship, parties would not appeal for enforcement of these terms, nor would it be practical to seek to enforce them on a day-to-day basis. But on dissolution, the caregiver could claim compensation for her work. A long-term contribution of caregiving could form a demonstrable basis for a claim to property and ongoing “severance [해고]” pay – and surely it is these long-term cases where the vulnerability is greatest.
This differs from other proposed legal rationales for spousal [배우자] support such as compensation for contributions to a spouse’s career, rehabilitation, income security, and equal opportunity (Jeske 2018, 180–184; Okin 1989). The rationale is not forward-looking like rehabilitation or income security; it is backward-looking, at the work the spouse has done. The compensation rationale aims to compensate the party for the contribution she has made to her partner’s career and the opportunities she has forgone, but my proposed model directly recognizes that care is work, independent of contributions made to the spouse’s career or lost opportunities.
Of course, equal opportunity may be an adequate rationale for spousal support. Arguably, the effects of gender-structured marriage are so detrimental to women’s equal opportunity that a Rawlsian principle of fair equal opportunity requires structuring the institution of the family to protect women on divorce. Further, there are problems with treating compensation for care work as a matter of interpersonal justice. A first is evidentiary: particularly with emotional labor, ① proving imbalance will be difficult. A second problem is that ② care work is underpaid. Thus, when an unpaid caregiver divorces a highly paid husband, her claim would be less when treated as compensation for years of minimum-wage work than when treated as entitlement to a share of his earnings or continuation of her standard of living. This model would benefit the worse-off at the expense of the better-off: wives of higher earners would have lower claims, but wives of lower earners would have equivalent claims to theirs, based on their work, despite their husband’s lower earnings. A third problem is ③ the “traditionalist” objection addressed earlier: a wife’s work might be considered “already paid” by earnings shared during the marriage. This applies only where the husband contributes financially and the wife does not – according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018) data, 19.5% of marriages in 2016 – but these would likely be cases of the greatest economic vulnerability. Although, if women’s work were properly valued – as caregiver, cleaner, nutritionist, and so on – the claim would be much higher (Waring 1999).
Finally, ④ this support model only applies to women leaving relationships that have been formalized in some way, as through minimal marriage. In the current U.S. context, spousal support provides less protection to groups with lower marriage rates such as the economically worse-off and African Americans. In addition, members of worse-off groups are less likely to be able to pay spousal support. Furthermore, the exploitation of emotional labor and caring attitudes occurs outside the context of marriage and male-female relationships. Emotional labor is extracted from women in professional contexts in which they are not paid for it as well as in social settings. Hence a broader rethinking of who cares, what care entails, and what risks imbalanced caring has is best able to protect all women, and not just married or partnered women.
For all these reasons, treating unpaid care as entitled to payment – a mandatory minimum wage – has limited value in protecting women’s interests. It is infeasible, particularly outside formalized contexts (i.e., marriage). The more feasible and broadly protective aspect of the proposal is the symbolic recognition of care as work, and of caregivers as deserving worker protections such as sick days. In practice, this could be accomplished by a state-funded service providing registered caregivers with respite [유예, 연기] for a certain number of sick days each year. Even more feasible (because less costly) would be through educational and public health campaigns highlighting the labor and the risks of care. Even such limited implementation could be effective. Recognizing that emotional labor is work and that it can diminish one’s self-respect might affect women’s willingness to perform it without reciprocation. Seeing care as risky work deserving protections could help to alter the way men and women think about desert. Law has an expressive function; just as “minimal marriage” (my name for marriage-like legal supports for friends and small groups) is intended, in part, to queer expectations around love and sex, recognizing the work aspect of care may begin to queer social expectations surrounding care, of who gives it, who receives it, and what they deserve.
One objection to treating unpaid care as work is that people can choose to donate work, foregoing compensation and workers’ protections, and presumably that is what unpaid caregivers do. But it is not true that people can donate any kind of work or that they can work under any conditions they choose. Some work is highly regulated: namely, work with high risks to self or others. Unpaid volunteers in many fields must undergo rigorous screening and adhere to strict conditions. Labor law paternalistically [온정주의적으로] prohibits or regulates employment that is risky to the employee. And in contract law, unpaid work leading to an employee’s impoverishment could be construed as unjust enrichment [강화, 비옥화] (Fineman 2004, 134). Moreover, it is well within the liberal paradigm to prohibit or regulate work that could be harmful to nonconsenting others. When the disempowerment of an unpaid caregiver affects her children through her poverty or their internalization of harmful gender roles, it becomes legitimate for the state to regulate such work.
This proposal may prompt two other practical concerns. First, on the Marxist account, workers working for wages outside the home are exploited within capitalism. Considering wives (or unpaid caregivers) as paid workers will not improve their position and in fact may make them worse-off. In U.S. law, wives have protections that paid workers do not. It is more difficult to “fire” wives; they have rights to compensation and a share of property (depending on state law) and access to the premises. But my assumption is that workers (including paid caregivers) should have fair worker protections; in an ideal liberal state these would be far greater than in current U.S. law.
Second, any proposal to treat exploited unpaid carers as paid care workers risks ignoring the serious challenges faced by paid care workers and may worsen their situation. The implications for paid caregivers are complex. For one thing, many paid caregivers are also unpaid caregivers, so measures to protect unpaid caregivers will apply to them. But there are class interests at stake. Unpaid caregivers who are also employers of less privileged paid caregivers have different class interests. As wives’ unpaid labor facilitates the exploitation of husband-workers, whose labor outside the home depends on receiving care within it, the labor of poor or migrant women facilitates exploitation of their female employers who work outside the home. Paid caregivers occupy the place that wives have in Marxist feminist critique, and working wives’ labor is exploited both as workers and as wives. Seeing unpaid caregiving as work could lead to solidarity between unpaid and paid caregivers. But it might also lead the privileged to feel threatened, if the rights of the less privileged are seen as coming at their expense (through higher taxes, for example).
This potential conflict points to the need for full worker protections for paid care workers. Paid caregivers have not received full legal protection as workers in U.S. law. Since the New Deal, and for reasons having to do with race and class, they have lacked the full protections against discrimination and retaliation [보복], and minimum wage and overtime protections, that other workers have (Schoenbaum 2015; Brake 2018). The many migrant care workers working unofficially have no worker protections.
On the other hand, the dichotomy between care and work harms paid care workers because it causes their unique vulnerabilities as carers to go unrecognized. And if paid care work is less valued because it is seen as women’s work and as altruistic [이타적인], then valuing unpaid care work more, and recognizing the burdens of emotional labor, stands to increase the perceived value of paid care work.
Objections: Power and Self-Interest
There are objections to bringing care under the liberal paradigm of the worker, who contracts freely and self-interestedly in a capitalist labor market. These objections concern a perceived tension between care and contract, where “contract” is used to signal relationships entered as transactions between self-interested individuals, with terms defined by the parties.
① The first objection concerns power: when individuals with unequal power define the terms of their agreement, the more powerful individual will get better terms.
② The second objection concerns self interest: contracts are self-interested, whereas care is altruistic.
1. The problem of power, discussed by Carole Pateman (1988), Okin (1989), Martha Minow and Mary Lyndon Shanley (1996), and Tamara Metz (2010), is that due to power inequalities between men and women, female primary caregivers in different-sex relationships may be pressured into disadvantageous agreements, and caregiving will amplify their vulnerability overtime. For example, replacing mandatory alimony [이혼수당] with contractual terms could remove protections from women made vulnerable through caregiving. Apparently freely entered contracts can perpetuate power hierarchies (Pateman 1988; Minow and Shanley 1996).
This is a problem for liberalism insofar as liberalism protects freedom of contract. If spouses freely choose an arrangement that makes one economically vulnerable, why should one partner be held financially responsible? Allowing spouses to contract regarding marital property might seem to protect liberal freedom – yet also threaten women’s equality. A number of theorists have attempted to answer this either by questioning the freedom of such choices or by appealing to egalitarian distributive principles to justify mandatory alimony or broader redistributive institutions for caregiving (Rawls 1997; Metz 2010; Alstott 2004; Okin 1989; Brake 2016).
The model I have proposed suggests another option, one compatible with those just mentioned. On this proposal, care is treated as work, but not as fully contractual. In the purest form of contract, contracting parties choose individualized terms. But law restricts the terms of contracts, by barring unjust enrichment, defining what we can contract, setting a minimum wage, and requiring worker protections. My proposed model limits agreements between spouses or partners by precluding unpaid care work without worker protections. Care work, it turns out, is in tension with the full and unrestricted application of contractual principles not because care is but because work is. Workers, even if their choices are free and the background distribution is fair, cannot contract into severely disadvantageous terms because of labor law protections. [231-232]
However, legally protecting caregivers can increase women’s vulnerability to power inequality by encouraging interdependency (Robeyns 2011). One warning comes from recent empirical research on same-sex divorce in the United Kingdom by Charlotte Bendall and Rosie Harding. Their study suggests that legal recognition of same-sex marriage may increase financial interdependence, which the previous lack of recognition discouraged. Drawing on in-depth interviews with lawyers and clients in same-sex dissolution proceedings, they hypothesize that “resistance to both compensation and maintenance . . . reflects pre-civil partnership approaches to relationship breakdown and the previous lack of legal support on the breakdown of longstanding same sex relationships.” But they predict that
[a]s those in same sex relationships find that they are no longer posi tioned outside of or “against” the law, approaches to money manage ment in legally recognised same sex relationships may shift towards greater levels of financial interdependence. Given the assumptions around financial interdependency that are inherent in the legal rec ognition of same sex partnerships, and the consequent reduction in welfare to support to those in same sex relationships (including those who do not choose to marry or enter into a civil partnership), it seems likely that higher levels of financial interdependence within same sex couples will result. (Bendall and Harding 2018, 151–152)
This supports the objection: if legally recognizing financial interde pendence encourages it, can the state recognize unpaid care work without incentivizing it and thereby reinforcing gender norms that facilitate power imbalances and the exploitation of care? This is a crucial practical problem, not just for my proposal but for any account of spousal support, intimate caregiving unions (Metz 2010), piecemeal [단편적인] directives governing relationship practices (Chambers 2017), or caregiver protections.
One (practical) question is whether it is possible to support care work without reinforcing gender norms. Another (theoretical) question is whether it is required by justice: if care work were protected as work, would its exploitation – its gender-structured imbalanced performance – be objectionable on liberal egalitarian grounds? [232]
It would. Even if care workers have a full – and ideal – set of worker protections, there is still reason for the liberal state to discourage imbalanced caring and the gendered imbalance in caring attitudes. The reason is the corrosive effects of imbalanced caring on self-respect. Due to the corrosive effects on self-respect, the state has reason to be concerned about any exploitation, in which one group subordinates its interests to another group, if that subordination is maintained by the basic structure.
2. Another theoretical problem arises from a tradition concerned that altruism may be corrupted by self-interest. This is the lingering [오래끄는] reservation that there is something fundamentally antithetical [현저하게 대조를 이루는] between attitudinal care and paid work – that paid relationships are not authentic caring relationships, that work is less valuable than care, and that care is valuable precisely because it is not self-interested or done for reciprocation.
It might be thought that what we value about caring is its authenticity. Paid emotional labor – the smile of a flight attendant – is only valued because it mimics what is truly valuable: authentic care. If authentic care in the home is treated as paid labor, the objection goes, this more authentic care may be “corrupted” into a performance, a simulacrum of truly valuable care. But this objection overlooks the extent to which unpaid caregivers may perform care when tired, frustrated, or otherwise preoccupied.
This objection arises from the long tradition of seeing care and contract, in its self-interested aspect, as oppositional – by conservatives who oppose treating marriage as a contract rather than an altruistic union and
by feminists who oppose the self-interested rational contractor model (see Brake 2012, 102–107). Feminists have pointed out the ubiquity of noncontractual relationships and the unrealistic abstraction of the model of the atomistic contractor. A broader range of moral and political philosophers (famously, GWF Hegel in his Philosophy of Right [1995]) have argued that contractual relationships are incompatible with the altruism of caring relationships.
To respond, it is important to distinguish legal contracts, or legally binding agreements, from relationships characterized by mutual self interest. Caring relationships are compatible with contractually entered legal arrangements: legal contracts can protect caregivers, and treating legal marriage (or marriage-like law) as contractual in some ways both respects liberties and removes sexist assumptions from law (Brake 2012, 102–107). But this does not speak to the deeper perceived tension between caring relationships and relationships entered from a self interested standpoint. This alleged opposition might be marshalled to defend the conceptual dichotomy between work and care.
From the moral point of view, encouraging unpaid caregivers to see themselves as workers who are owed compensation might seem morally detrimental. In most cases of caring, tensions will arise between prioritizing the cared-for, the caring relationship, or self-interest. Often, the carer’s sacrificing self-interest for the cared-for, as parents do for their children, is seen as morally praiseworthy.
I find this tension somewhat overstated: a relationship entered into out of self-interest can also be authentically caring, and authentically car ing relationships can be regulated to protect the interests of each party. Law can protect against vulnerabilities arising in care relationships. Furthermore, as John Tomasi (1991) has pointed out, altruism conceptually depends on the giver’s having an entitlement to what is given. Recognizing the caregiver’s separate interests, from this perspective, is a condition of altruism. While the self-interested contractor may seem morally inferior when contrasted with the altruistic self-sacrificer, the caregiver’s ability to make self-protective claims precludes the morally defective alternative of entitled, parasitic exploitation.
My proposal might seem vulnerable to practical reductios. Does it imply that children owe payment to their parents for care received? No, because children are not in a position to agree to terms and because imbalanced caring for those who cannot care for themselves does not have the corrosive effects on self-respect that subordinating one’s needs to those of an equal does. (Although, of course, caring for dependents can take a heavy toll on the caregiver’s physical and mental health.) But the proposal could have other implications for family relations: for instance, perhaps adult children who provide uncompensated care for elderly parents would have a larger claim against their estate than their siblings.
Care ethicists concerned with the creeping [서서히 진행되는] commodification [상업화] and contractualization of intimate life might object that this strategy seeks to gain respect and power for caregivers by assimilating care to work. Care is valuable itself, and not merely qua work. This is true, and I have argued elsewhere that the liberal state has reason to recognize this value. My point is not that care is valuable only qua work but that caregiving can be work and deserves the protections and respect accorded to work.
For those concerned with commodification, as well as socialist feminists who argue that feminism is incompatible with capitalism, my proposal might seem like a reductio of liberal feminism – rather than attacking commodification and markets, it subordinates one of the last holdouts [저항] to market norms to those very norms. I do not assume that the ideal feminist liberal egalitarian society would be capitalist; but in a capitalist society, the power of market forces should be recognized and regulated.
For care is not, in fact, a holdout to market norms, although it is idealized as such. Much caregiving is paid and subject to market norms, without the protections offered to other workers. Romanticizing care as altruistic, or free from market pressures, serves both to rationalize excluding paid caregivers from full legal protections as workers and to obscure the work done within the home by women. Markets pressure care in many ways. Caring for children or for elderly people or others who need care is expensive, and women who do such care have to weigh the costs of care and their earnings from paid work. Markets shape not just caregiving but the choices to have children and to marry (McClain 2013; Becker 1993).
The larger problem is the extent to which instrumentalizing workers, treating them without dignity and as replaceable, and commodification – treating all goods as reducible to money – have crept into all aspects of life. Regulation to protect workers’ rights is a way to push back against the former. Policies valuing attitudinal care and caring relationships, in which others are valued for their own sakes, not instrumentally, push back against both. Even if care is recognized as work, the value of caring relationships, their unique goods, and the distinctive vulnerabilities of caregivers can simultaneously be acknowledged.