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Caregiving

Caregiving is gendered, and gendered caregiving contributes to gender inequality. In this entry, caregiving is defined as affect and actions that are responsive to an individual's needs and well-being within a face-to-face relationship. Issues treated here are the emergence of modern ideas of caring; how caregiving is gendered; the relationship between unpaid and paid care work, including why caregiving jobs are underpaid and whether payment undermines care; and how affluent democracies support caregiving.

In the past few decades, philosophers, historians, social scientists, and scholars of “social politics” and “social care” have theorized and researched caregiving in relation to gender inequality. This literature frequently uses the term care work to describe the time-consuming, effortful labor that caregivers invest in relations of care. The definition in this entry does not include the sustaining activities of economic provision and other feelings and actions that Nell Noddings labels “caring about” though not “caring for” those in need of care, which is how men have more traditionally cared for dependent others. This division of taking care by earning or authorizing the giving of care service originated in 19th-century changes in gendered divisions of labor and identities.

Care and the Emergence of Private Life

The association of women with caregiving as an affective individual-oriented relationship is a historically recent idea. In most preindustrial societies, the demands of work and the communal, rather than individual, orientation of family economies constrained sentimental and attentive care. After infancy, children, especially boys, were under the daily supervision of their fathers, so the basic care of children was not a sharply gendered activity. In the 19th century, when the rise of market economies created “separate spheres” of home and work, new ideas about men and women associated their natures with the spheres of responsibility to which they were assigned. Women became “angels of the hearth,” whose newly conceived pure and tender natures made them caring and nurturant mothers and consoling partners for husbands who sought refuge from the cold and competitive world of work.

The organizations and institutions of the modern Western world built in the transition to urban industrial society institutionalized the “separate spheres” attribution of care to women. The concept of worker that became embedded in the modern workplace involved an individual who was freed of care during a long work day because his private needs and family were in the care of a domestic wife and mother. Correspondingly, only women who did not have to contribute wages to their families could be recognized as good, caring mothers. The concept of citizen centered on independence through paid work or property; the citizen's children were socialized for adult citizenship (and either work or care) by a domestic caregiver. Worker and citizen were formally gender-neutral concepts, but the roles were accessible only to providers whose partners were caregivers. In the 19th-century foundations of modern organizations and institutions, the association of women with attentive and nurturing care was sturdily and restrictively built.

A Caring Sex?

Are women naturally more caring? In societies in which infants can be fed only by breast or in which agricultural labor requires large numbers of children's and men's greater physical strength can be put to great economic advantage, the division of labor by sex appears natural. Nevertheless, wide historical and cross-cultural variation in women's roles in divisions of labor and ideas about women's dispositions are evidence that biology has very limited effects on care.

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