Fortunes of Feminism (23 page)

Leisure-Time Equality
: Caregiver Parity does somewhat better, however, with respect to equality of leisure time. It makes it possible for all women to avoid the double shift if they choose, by opting for full- or part-time supported carework at various stages in their lives. (Currently, this choice is available only to a small percentage of privileged US women.) We just saw, however, that this choice is not truly costless. Some women with families will not want to forego the benefits of breadwinner-track employment and will try to combine it with carework. Those not partnered with someone on the caregiver track will be significantly disadvantaged with respect to leisure time, and probably in their employment as well. Men, in contrast, will largely be insulated from this dilemma. On leisure time, then, the model is only fair.

Equality of Respect
: Caregiver Parity is also only fair at promoting equality of respect. Unlike Universal Breadwinner, it offers two different routes to that end. Theoretically, citizen-workers and citizen-caregivers are statuses of equivalent dignity. But are they really on a par with one another? Caregiving is certainly treated more respectfully in this model than in current US society, but it remains associated with femininity. Breadwinning likewise remains associated with masculinity. Given those traditional gender associations, plus the economic differential between the two lifestyles, caregiving is unlikely to attain true parity with breadwinning. In general, it is hard to imagine how “separate but equal” gender roles could provide genuine equality of respect today.

Anti-Marginalization
: Caregiver Parity performs poorly, moreover, in preventing women's marginalization. By supporting women's informal carework, it reinforces the view of such work as women's work and consolidates the gender division of domestic labor. By consolidating dual labor markets for breadwinners and caregivers, moreover, the model marginalizes women within the employment sector. By reinforcing the association of caregiving with femininity, finally, it may also impede women's participation in other spheres of life, such as politics and civil society.

Anti-Androcentrism
: Yet Caregiver Parity is better than Universal Breadwinner at combating androcentrism. It treats caregiving as intrinsically valuable, not as a mere obstacle to employment, thus challenging the view that only men's traditional activities are fully human. It also accommodates “feminine” life-patterns, thereby rejecting the demand that women assimilate to “masculine” patterns. But the model still leaves something to be desired. Caregiver Parity stops short of affirming the universal value of activities and life-patterns associated with women. It does not value caregiving enough to demand that men do it, too; it does not ask men to change. Thus, Caregiver Parity represents only one-half of a full-scale challenge to androcentrism. Here, too, its performance is only fair.

In general, Caregiver Parity improves the lot of women with significant carework responsibilities. But for those women, as well as for others, it fails to deliver full gender justice.

4. TOWARD A UNIVERSAL CAREGIVER MODEL

Both Universal Breadwinner and Caregiver Parity are highly utopian visions of a postindustrial welfare state. Either one of them would represent a major improvement over current US arrangements. Yet neither is likely to be realized soon. Both models assume background preconditions that are strikingly absent today. Both presuppose major political-economic restructuring, including significant public control over corporations, the capacity to direct investment to create high-quality permanent jobs, and the ability to tax profits
and wealth
at rates sufficient to fund expanded high-quality social programs. Both models also assume broad popular support for a postindustrial welfare state that is committed to gender justice.

If both models are utopian in this sense, neither is utopian enough. Neither Universal Breadwinner nor Caregiver Parity can actually make good on its promise of gender justice—even under very favorable conditions. Although both are good at preventing women's poverty and exploitation, both are only fair at redressing inequality of respect: Universal Breadwinner holds women to the same standard as men, while constructing arrangements that prevent them from meeting it fully; Caregiver Parity, in contrast, sets up a double standard to accommodate gender difference, while institutionalizing policies that fail to assure equivalent respect for “feminine” activities and life-patterns. When we turn to the remaining principles, moreover, the two models' strengths and weaknesses diverge. Universal Breadwinner fails especially to promote equality of leisure time and to combat androcentrism, while Caregiver Parity fails especially to promote income equality and to prevent women's marginalization. Neither model, in addition, promotes women's full participation on a par with men in politics and civil society. And neither values female-associated practices enough to ask men to do them too; neither asks men to change. Neither model, in sum, provides everything feminists want. Even in a highly idealized form, neither delivers full gender justice.

If these were the only possibilities, we would face a very difficult set of tradeoffs. Suppose, however, we reject this Hobson's choice and try to develop a third alternative. The trick is to envision a postindustrial welfare state that combines the best of Universal Breadwinner with the best of Caregiver Parity, while jettisoning the worst features of each. What third alternative is possible?

So far we have examined—and found wanting—two initially plausible approaches: one aiming to make women more like men are now; the other leaving men and women pretty much unchanged, while aiming to make women's difference costless. A third possibility is to
induce men to become more like most women are now
—viz., people who do primary carework.

Consider the effects of this one change on the models we have just examined. If men were to do their fair share of carework, Universal Breadwinner would come much closer to equalizing leisure time and eliminating androcentrism, while Caregiver Parity would do a much better job of equalizing income and reducing women's marginalization. Both models, in addition, would tend to promote equality of respect. If men were to become more like women are now, in sum, both models would begin to approach gender justice.

The key to achieving gender justice in a postindustrial welfare state, then, is to make women's current life-patterns the norm for everyone. Women today often combine breadwinning and caregiving, albeit with great difficulty and strain. A postindustrial welfare state must ensure that men do the same, while redesigning institutions so as to eliminate the difficulty and strain.

We might call this vision
Universal Caregiver
.

What, then, might such a welfare state look like? Unlike Caregiver Parity, its employment sector would not be divided into two different tracks; all jobs would be designed for workers who are caregivers, too; all would have a shorter work week than full-time jobs have now; and all would have the support of employment-enabling services. Unlike Universal Breadwinner, however, employees would not be assumed to shift all carework to social services. Some informal carework would be publicly supported and integrated on a par with paid work in a single social-insurance system. Some would be performed in households by relatives and friends, but such households would not necessarily be heterosexual nuclear families. Other supported carework would be located outside households altogether—in civil society. In state-funded but locally organized institutions, childless adults, older people, and others without kin-based responsibilities would join parents and others in democratic, self-managed carework activities.

A Universal Caregiver welfare state would promote gender justice by effectively dismantling the gendered opposition between breadwinning and caregiving. It would integrate activities that are currently separated from one another, eliminate their gender-coding, and encourage men to perform them too. This, however, is tantamount to a wholesale restructuring of the institution of gender. The construction of breadwinning and caregiving as separate roles, coded masculine and feminine respectively, is a principal undergirding of the current gender order. To dismantle those roles and their cultural coding is in effect to overturn that order. It means subverting the existing gender division of labor and reducing the salience of gender as a structural principle of social organization.
⁴³
At the limit, it suggests deconstructing gender.
⁴⁴
By deconstructing the opposition between breadwinning and caregiving, moreover, Universal Caregiver would simultaneously deconstruct the associated opposition between bureaucratized public institutional settings and intimate private domestic settings. Treating civil society as an additional site for carework, it would overcome both the “workerism” of Universal Breadwinner and the domestic privatism of Caregiver Parity. Thus, Universal Caregiver promises expansive new possibilities for enriching the substance of social life and for promoting equal participation.

Only by embracing the Universal Caregiver vision, moreover, can we mitigate potential conflicts among our seven component principles of gender justice and minimize the need for trade-offs. Rejecting this approach, in contrast, makes such conflicts, and hence trade-offs, more likely.
Achieving gender justice in a postindustrial welfare state, then, requires deconstructing gender
.

Much more work needs to be done to develop this third—Universal Caregiver—vision of a postindustrial welfare state. A key is to develop policies that discourage free-riding.
Contra
conservatives, the real free-riders in the current system are not poor solo mothers who shirk employment. Instead they are men of all classes who shirk carework and domestic labor, as well as corporations who free-ride on the labor of working people, both underpaid and unpaid.

A good statement of the Universal Caregiver vision comes from the Swedish Ministry of Labor: “To make it possible for both men and women to combine parenthood and gainful employment, a new view of the male role and a radical change in the organization of working life are required.”
⁴⁵
The trick is to imagine a social world in which citizens' lives integrate wage-earning, caregiving, community activism, political participation, and involvement in the associational life of civil society—while also leaving time for some fun. This world is not likely to come into being in the immediate future. But it is the only imaginable postindustrial world that promises true gender justice. And unless we are guided by this vision now, we will never get any closer to achieving it.

^*
Research for this essay was supported by the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University. For helpful comments, I am indebted to Rebecca Blank, Joshua Cohen, Fay Cook, Barbara Hobson, Axel Honneth, Jenny Mansbridge, Linda Nicholson, Ann Shola Orloff, John Roemer, Ian Shapiro, Tracy Strong, Peter Taylor-Gooby, Judy Wittner, Eli Zaretsky, and the members of the Feminist Public Policy Work Group of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University.

1
Mimi Abramowitz,
Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present
, Boston: South End Press, 1988; Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” in Fraser,
Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory
, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989; Linda Gordon, “What Does Welfare Regulate?”
Social Research
55:4, Winter 1988, 609–30; Hilary Land, “Who Cares for the Family?”
Journal of Social Policy
7:3, July 1978, 257–84. An exception to the built-in family-wage assumption is France, which from early on accepted high levels of female waged work. See Jane Jenson, “Representations of Gender: Policies to ‘Protect' Women Workers and Infants in France and the United States before 1914,” in
Women, the State, and Welfare
, ed. Linda Gordon, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

2
This account of the tripartite structure of the welfare state represents a modification of the account I proposed in “Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation.” There I followed Barbara Nelson in positing a two-tier structure of ideal-typically “masculine“ social insurance programs and ideal-typically “feminine” family support programs. (See her “Women's Poverty and Women's Citizenship: Some Political Consequences of Economic Marginality,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
10:2, Winter 1984, 209–31, and “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in
Women, the State, and Welfare
, ed. Linda Gordon.) Although that view was a relatively accurate picture of the US social-welfare system, I now consider it analytically misleading. The United States is unusual in that the second and third tiers are conflated. What was for many decades the main program of means-tested poor relief—Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—was also the main program supporting women's childraising. Analytically, however, these are best understood as two distinct tiers of social welfare. When social insurance is added, we get a three-tier welfare state.

3
David Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989; Scott Lash and John Urry,
The End of Organized Capitalism
, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987; Robert Reich,
The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism
, New York: Knopf, 1991.

4
Joan Smith, “The Paradox of Women's Poverty: Wage-earning Women and Economic Transformation,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
9:2, Winter 1984, 291–310.