Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-b95js Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-14T17:33:33.170Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

Chapter 7 - Gender, Capital, and Care

By
Nancy Fraser
Edited by
Jude Browne
Jude Browne
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access

Summary

We hear a lot of talk today about “the crisis of care.”1 Often linked to such phrases as “time poverty,” “family/work balance,” and “social depletion,”2 this expression refers to the pressures, coming from several directions, that are currently squeezing a key set of social capacities: the capacities available for birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally. Historically, this work of “social reproduction,” as I shall call it, has been cast as women’s work, although men have always done some of it too. Comprising both affective and material labor, and often performed without pay, it is indispensable to society. Without it there could be no culture, no economy, no political organization.

Type
Chapter
Information
Why Gender? , pp. 144 - 169
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, David Wallace. 1995. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press.Google Scholar
Arruzza, Cinzia. 2016. Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism and its Critics. Science & Society, 80(1), 9–30.Google Scholar
Bair, Jennifer. 2010. On Difference and Capital: Gender and the Globalization of Production. Signs, 36(1) 203–26.Google Scholar
Baran, Paul A. 1957. The Political Economy of Growth. New York: Calder.Google Scholar
Baron, Ava. 1981. Protective Labor Legislation and the Cult of Domesticity. Journal of Family Issues, 2(1) 25–38.Google Scholar
Beck, Martha. 2015. Finding Work-Life Balance: How To Keep Your Job And Home Lives Separate And Healthy. The Huffington Post, March 10. www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/10/work-life-balance-job-home-strategies-for-women_n_3044764.html.Google Scholar
Belkin, Lisa. 2003. The Opt-Out Revolution. New York Times, October 26.Google Scholar
Bezanson, Kate and Luxton, Meg, eds. 2006. Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.Google Scholar
Boffey, Daniel. 2015. Half of All Services Now Failing as UK Care Sector Crisis Deepens. The Guardian, September 26. www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/26/nearly-half-social-care-services-failing-uk-elderly-disabled-welfare.Google Scholar
Boushey, Heather. 2016. Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Boushey, Heather and Anderson, Amy Rees. 2013. Work-Life Balance: 5 Ways To Turn It From The Ultimate Oxymoron Into A Real Plan. Forbes, July 26. www.forbes.com/sites/amyanderson/2013/07/26/work-life-balance-the-ultimate-oxymoron-or-5-tips-to-help-you-achieve-better-worklife-balance/?sh=22d3a2265841#7afl0a775841.Google Scholar
Brenner, Johanna. 1991. Gender, Social Reproduction, and Women’s Self-Organization: Considering the U.S. Welfare State. Gender & Society, 5(3), 311–33.Google Scholar
Churchill, Ward. 2004. Kill the Indian and Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights.Google Scholar
Coontz, Stephanie. 1988. The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families 1600–1900. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Davis, Angela Y. 1972. Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves. The Massachusetts Review, 13(2), 81–100.Google Scholar
Delphy, C. 1984. Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression. D. Leonard, trans. Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Engels, Frederick. 2001 [1902]. The Origin of the Family: Private Property and the State. Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific.Google Scholar
Ewen, Stuart. 2008. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and The Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Federici, Silvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. New York: Common Notions.Google Scholar
Folbre, Nancy. 2002. The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Governmentality. In Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter, eds., The Foucault Effect. Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 87–104.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures at College de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation. In Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, pp. 144–60.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 2009. Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History. New Left Review, 56, 97–117.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 2011. Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a Neo-Polanyian Conception of Capitalist Crisis. In Calhoun, Craig and Derluguian, Georgi, eds., Business as Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown. New York: New York University Press, pp. 137–58.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 2013. A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi. New Left Review, 81, 119–32.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 2014. Behind Marx’s “Hidden Abode”: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism. New Left Review, 86, 55–72.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 2015. Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism. Critical Historical Studies, 2(2) 157–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1992. From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 18(1), 1–43.Google Scholar
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2010. Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hayden, Dolores. 2003. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Hess, Cynthia. 2013. Women and the Care Crisis. Institute for Women’s Policy Research Briefing Paper, IWPR C#401, April. www.iwpr.org/publications/pubs/women-and-the-care-crisis-valuing-in-home-care-in-policy-and-practice.Google Scholar
Hobson, Barbara. 1990. Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie. 2001. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan Books.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie. 2002. Love and Gold. In Ehrenreich, Barbara and Hochschild, Arlie, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan/Owl Books, pp. 15–30.Google Scholar
Holter, Harriet, ed. 1984. Patriarchy in a Welfare Society. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar
Jones, Jacqueline, 1985. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Jung, Courtney, 2015. Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira, 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York; London: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Kliff, Sarah, 2013. The Breast Pump Industry is Booming, Thanks to Obamacare. The Washington Post, January 4. www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/04/the-breast-pump-industry-is-booming-thanks-to-obamacare/.Google Scholar
Köhler, Gernot and Tausch, Arno. 2001. Global Keynesianism: Unequal Exchange and Global Exploitation. New York: Nova Science Publishers.Google Scholar
Land, Hilary. 1978. Who Cares for the Family? Journal of Social Policy, 7(3), 257–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laslett, Barbara and Brenner, Johanna. 1989. Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives. Annual Review of Sociology, 15, 381–404.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1978. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Tucker, Robert C, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York and London: W. W. Norton, pp. 487–88.Google Scholar
Mies, Maria. 2014. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. London: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Miller, Lisa. 2013. The Retro Wife. New York Magazine, March 17.Google Scholar
Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Nelson, Barbara J. 1985. Women’s Poverty and Women’s Citizenship: Some Political Consequences of Economic Marginality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 10(2), 209–31.Google Scholar
O’Connor, James. 1988. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 1(1) 1–22.Google Scholar
Orloff, A. S. 1993. Gender and Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States. American Sociological Review, 58(3), 303–28.Google Scholar
Orloff, A. S. 2009. Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States: An Unfinished Agenda. Sociological Theory, 27, 317–43.Google Scholar
Orloff, S., O’Connor, J. S. and Shaver, S. 1999. States, Markets, Families: Gender, Liberalism and Social Policy in Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pearce, Diana. 1979. Women, Work and Welfare: The Feminization of Poverty. In Wolk, Karen, ed., Working Women and Families. Feinstein, Beverly Hills, Calif. and London: Sage Publishing, pp. 103–24.Google Scholar
Pilling, Geoffrey. 1973. Imperialism, Trade and “Unequal Exchange”: The Work of Aghiri Emmanuel. Economy and Society, 2(2), 164–85.Google Scholar
Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Prebisch, Raúl. 1950. The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems. New York: United Nations Department of Economic Affairs.Google Scholar
Quadagno, Jill. 1994. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rai, Shirin M., Catherine Hoskyns, and Dania Thomas. 2013. Depletion: The Cost of Social Reproduction. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16(1), 1–20.Google Scholar
Roberts, Adrienne. 2013. Financing Social Reproduction: The Gendered Relations of Debt and Mortgage Finance in Twenty-First Century America. New Political Economy, 18(1), 21–42.Google Scholar
Rosen, Ruth. 2007. The Care Crisis. The Nation, February 27. www.thenation.com/article/care-crisis/.Google Scholar
Ross, Kristin. 1996. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Ruggie, Mary. 1984. The State and Working Women: A Comparative Study of Britain and Sweden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sainsbury, Diane, ed. 2000. Gender and Welfare State Regimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sassen, Saski. 2000. Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival. Journal of International Affairs, 53(2), 503–24.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Michael. 2016. Pentagon to Offer Plan to Store Eggs and Sperm to Retain Young Troops. New York Times, February 3. www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/us/politics/pentagon-to-offer-plan-to-store-eggs-and-sperm-to-retain-young-troops.html.Google Scholar
Shulevitz, Judith. 2016. How to Fix Feminism. New York Times, June 10.Google Scholar
Siim, Birte. 1990. Women and the Welfare State: Between Private and Public Dependence. In Ungerson, Clare, ed., Gender and Caring. London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 93–96.Google Scholar
Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2012. Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. The Atlantic, July–August.Google Scholar
Slaughter, Anne-Marie. 2015. Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family. London: Oneworld Publications.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan Education.Google Scholar
Tilly, Louise A. and Scott, Joan W. 1987. Women, Work, and Family. London; New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Tran, Mark. 2014. Apple and Facebook offer to freeze eggs for female employees. The Guardian, October 15. www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/15/apple-facebook-offer-freeze-eggs-female-employees.Google Scholar
Vogel, Lise. 2013. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Walkowitz, Judith R. 1980. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Warner, Judith. 2006. Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. London: Ebury Digital.Google Scholar
Warren, Elizabeth and Warren Tyagi, Amelia. 2003. The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Woloch, Nancy. 2015. A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, F. et al. 2007. Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe: New Challenges for Citizenship Research in a Cross-National Context. Bristol: Policy.Google Scholar
Young, Brigitte. 2001. The “Mistress” and the “Maid” in the Globalized Economy. Socialist Register, 37, 315–27.Google Scholar
Zaretsky, Eli. 1986. Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×