1 of 6
by Emily K. Abel Harvard Univ. Press, 2000 352 pp.; $19.95, paper |
I was giving a talk at a Catholic church just outside Chicago when one member of the audience stood up, apologizing because she had to leave. She explained that she was part of the "Quad Squad," a team assigned to help with round-the-clock care for quadruplets born a few weeks earlier to a couple who were members of the church community. Such voluntary caregiving—disproportionately provided by women—is invaluable, yet it commands little respect, argues Emily Abel in Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850-1940. Indeed, Abel writes, in this culture at this time we routinely "disparage the people who sustain life and nurture the weak." We prefer to maintain our illusion of independence in all things. No one wants to be dependent. In fact, it has even become the name of a syndrome—codependence—and is to be avoided at all costs. How strange that a state we all share—that of dependence on others—becomes a condition we first deny exists and then re-cast as pathological.
But the reality won't go away. Whether the focus is on preschool-age children or aging parents, practical questions of caregiving are central to many American households. And increasingly, scholars in many fields—moral theory, psychology, political philosophy, and more—are turning to the subject of care.
This current attention to care has many sources, but the most significant of these is feminist thought, in particular the evolving feminist debate over motherhood as the archetype of caregiving. Motherhood took a beating in 1970s feminist political tracts and treatises, which tended to see caregiving as a kind of servitude imposed on women by a patriarchal society. But the visceral antipathy toward mothering expressed by radical feminists helped to spur a reaction in the 1980s, when a few brave souls opined that perhaps the family was not the source of all political evil. Today exploration of mothering is widespread among feminist writers and scholars who are rethinking the world of women's work, seeing in the historic connection of women to caregiving a source of strength, a form of knowledge, and a claim to authority.
The anti-maternal camp didn't give up without a fight. Some spoke darkly of creeping "pro-natalism" in the women's movement. But the debate had shifted in ways both salutary and problematic. A problematic feature was an unfortunate tendency to counterpose "justice" (as an abstract "male" concept with pretensions to universality and even-handedness) to "care" (associated with keen attunement to the particular case and, of course, with women's work). Why it seemed a good idea to pit justice against care remains a mystery to me. Surely an interesting struggle from the beginning of Western philosophy to the present moment has been to bring justice and care, the many and the one, into a single frame. Surely egalitarianism need not mean homogenization and justice isn't reducible to a "male model" of reason, even-handedness, and impartiality. (Why is that a male model anyway?)
Responsible critics, by contrast to those who claimed that some weird "identification with patriarchy" explained the reevaluation of women's work, argued that proponents of a care ethic romanticized female feeling above ostensibly male abstract thought, reproducing the hoary dichotomies that feminism was supposed to be deconstructing in the first place. Care theorists replied by insisting that women's concentration on relationships and particular cases, on the attentive work of love, was a psychological achievement and an epistemological stance, not something hard-wired into nature. Men could get in on the act, too. If they did they became "mothers" as well. "Fathers" were still left out on the doorstep cooling their heels in many of these discussions, and attempts to bracket sticky questions of what male and female embodiment might have to do with psychologies and epistemologies couldn't be held at bay indefinitely. Still, it was a relief not to have mothers treated as a bereft, ground-down "sex-class" doomed to reproduce the system that had victimized them.
share this page
RSS Feed
