Women's paid work and moral economies of care

Abstract

Female labour force participation has been increasing in recent decades, in part encouraged by state policies to raise the employment rate to encourage economic competitiveness and combat social exclusion. Social provision for care, however, has lagged behind this increase, creating practical and moral dilemmas for individuals and for society, facing parents with complex choices about how to combine work and care. In this paper, we draw on a qualitative study in London to explore the extent to which the large-scale entry of women into waged work is altering women's understandings of their duties and responsibilities to care for others. We conclude that their decisions are influenced by class position, entrenched gender inequalities in the labour market, varying abilities to pay for care and complex gendered understandings of caring responsibilities.

Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families

“…To expand, there is, for example, a small but significant tradition of research within this literature which looks at pre-school provision and examines how parents' use of diverse forms of 'educare' both shapes and is shaped by ideas about the meaning of childhood and what good mothers/parents are supposed to provide (Holloway, 1998(Holloway, , 1999McDowell et al, 2005). Equally, there is a literature on travel to and from childcare and school, including studies of parents' gendered responsibilities, initiatives such as walking buses and analyses of what the journey to and from school means to children (Kearns et al, 2003;Pooley et al, 2005;Ross, 2007;Schwanen, 2007), as well as a policy-informing literature on children's experiences of after-school clubs (Smith and Barker, 2000.…”

The business of care

“…On a more fundamental level, the use of markets to organize and deliver care as a social good has been contested (Green and Lawson, 2011;Lawson, 2007;Lloyd and Penn, 2010). Stemming from this work is a questioning of the viability of a childcare market at all, given the deeply competing logics at work (Folbre and Nelson, 2000;McDowell et al, 2005). Critics have argued that the market ideal which has gained traction is fundamentally based around a set of assumptions derived from economics, assumptions which do not hold true when care and reproductive labour more generally are rendered into new forms of fictitious commodities (Fraser, 2014).…”

“…A key site of concern for many feminist geographers has been the growing inequities between women, in terms of who now does the majority of the outsourced care work in post-industrial economies (Lawson, 2007;McDowell, 2001;McDowell et al, 2005). As McDowell (2008) argues, while the gendered nature of the workforce in neoliberal childcare markets has gained attention, there is also an increasingly important class dimension, as it is a workforce which is largely fuelled by lower socio-economic and migrant labour groups (see also Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003;Pratt, 2003).…”

On the relational dynamics of caring: a psychotherapeutic approach to emotional and power dimensions of women's care work

“…Gaps and inadequacies in provision (for example McDowell et al 2005), together with the (uncaring) organisation of care services (for example England et al 2007), doubtless contribute to this oppressiveness. However, more important for my argument is that, for both care-givers and care-recipients, the oppressiveness of care is deeply felt.…”