The devaluation of carework is symptom of gender-neutral economic policies that guarantee gendered violence and international economic crises

Whereas debates ensue about the compatibility of economic and caring motives or the relationship of gender equality in the labor market to household labor,68 at a basic level nonwaged or low-waged care work remains essential to the functioning of market productivity.69 The embeddedness and function of caring labor in the larger political economy has been obscured by its conceptualization as a private family matter, love, and natural to women. As Glenn puts it, Characterizing work in these ways serves the interests of capital by defining this form of labor as separate from and outside the political and economic system. By denying that caring serves to maintain the labor force and therefore the productive processes, these conceptions help corporations and their investors evade responsibility for paying the costs of sustaining workers and families. ... It also serves the interest of men as a class by defining caring work by women as part of a natural order and therefore immutable.70 She argues that global capital benefits by eliminating the costs of “reproduction” to maximize profits, but so do men as a class, “who on average carry less of the burden and enjoy more of the benefits of caring work.”71 Whereas the global economy in its present form would stop functioning without nonmarket caring labor, the ways in which the work of social reproduction ensues perpetuate harmful structural inequalities.72 Women’s entrance into the workforce has advanced without any reduction in the average workweek for workers to meet caring responsibilities; US workers work longer hours than their counterparts in all other industrialized nations, experiencing a “time bind” as they attempt to meet career and caring demands without public child care or paid leave, a bind familiar to working class families. As Hochschild laments, “In the end, both First and Third World women are all players in a larger economic game whose rules they have not written.” The employment of migrant women as a cheap labor source serves the ends of capitalism particularly efficiently, given that “neither capital nor citizens pay for their reproduction, maintenance, or education.” Hence employers lack incentive to question this “ideal-worker setup.” Women’s entrance into the professional workforce also “coincided with the international deregulation of markets and crumbling job protections.” Dominant cultural strains of individualism and meritocracy reinforce this form of capitalism concerned with maximizing output and profit while minimizing or eliminating labor costs. Their influence helps eclipse structural injustices from view, framing struggles for survival or the “time bind” in terms of luck or personal choices alone. Regardless of position or gender, in today’s globalized economy the ideal worker is conceived of as “ economicus unconstrained either by dependency or requirements homo concerning job security, schedule, levels of pay, or free time.”78 Hinze characterizes this ideal as a “mythic, masculinized creature whose performance on the public economic stage depends on the decidedly non-mythic, material toil, and care work of a cadre of backstage supporters in the familial household and beyond.” To sustain the myth, this care infrastructure is moreover “systematically obscured in daily workplaces, excluded or underreported in most measures of economic productivity, and rarely adequately rewarded.”79 In US context, this invisible infrastructure also helps sustain the related myth of meritocracy, which further undermines the cultivation of solidarity.80 Hence the individualism shaping the ideal worker also impacts (lagging) social responses to care needs. Cultures that tout individual responsibility tolerate gendered and racialized inequalities with respect to care labor due to dominant assumptions about the provisions of a free market: “The state is not mandated to respond to those inequalities, nor does it have to establish mechanisms to ensure more equitable distributions of either social goods or responsibilities.”81 The agency of those who benefit from domestic labor is bolstered and the myth of meritocracy sustained. Individualism inhibits government responses to the commodification of care labor in such cultures as it drives the need for workers to mask the “backstage support” that makes possible their public contributions. Individualism also characterizes dominant notions of parenting in the West (among Euro-American families in particular). If children were viewed more as a collective good and their care a public responsibility, such societies could reimagine not only care infrastructures, but also the damaging ways individual accounts of responsibility for children’s success inure us “to the social structures that contribute to the growing gaps among the advantaged and less advantaged children.”82 Given cultures that describe us as workers, parents, and working parents actions.83 Against a backdrop of individualistic and neoliberal capitalistic culture, the intersectional operations of gender, race, and citizenship oppression similarly serve to entrench an exploitative caring infrastructure. They are, of course, also interconnected: a dual-spheres division of labor is not only a patriarchal structure that subordinates women, but also a social strategy that has deployed status obligations and affective motivators to ensure the provision of caring labor for the market.84 Dependency care expectations continue to be imbued with culturally potent meanings, playing on status obligations, stigma, guilt, as well as vocation. Kate Manne’s recent work frames gendered. Care labor in terms of “an illegitmate sense of male entitlement," rooted in the social expectation that women "give traditional feminine goods (such as sex, care, nurturing, and reproductive labor) to designated, often more privileged men, and refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods (such as power, authority, and claims to knowledge) away from them.” Correlations of precarious and poorly paid work to female workers “undergirded by the influential (‘cheap, docile, dexterous’) myth of ‘productive femininity,’” further exemplify this deep-seated relationship between difference and capital in modern market economies.” In US context, assumptions about women’s labor have often

reflected the experiences of heterosexual, middle to upper-class white women, such as those portrayed in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.87 As bell hooks points out, Friedan addressed neither who would manage the work of social production if more women gained access to professional work, nor the needs of women without men, children, means, and race privilege.88 Given US historical practices of racialized servitude, “Courts, as well as customs and mores, continued to protect the property interests of employers in the labor of racialized workers despite the banning of formal indenture and chattel slavery” through the mid-twentieth century.89 As Glenn notes, “Racist ideology justified coercion by negating the personhood of people of color, thus rendering them and their labor ‘at the disposal’ of whites and employers. These assumptions have lingered in the treatment of household domestic and care employees as ‘hired property.’”90 Delores Williams’s work on social role surrogacy details the antebellum and postbellum forms this structure of domination has taken.91 Both coerced surrogacy, “legally supported in the ownership rights by which slave masters controlled their property, for example, black women,” and voluntary surrogacy, “the social pressures that influenced black women to continue to fill some surrogacy roles” after emancipation, have served to perpetuate exploitation.92 Coerced surrogacy (in areas of nursing, childrearing, sexual gratification) in slavery bound Black women “to a system that had respect for neither their bodies, their dignity, their labor, nor their motherhood except as it was put to the service of securing the well- being of the ruling class white families.”93 Williams recounts the establishment of the Black Mammy Memorial Institute in Athens, Georgia, for example, to underscore how white citizens worked to “perpetuate the mammy roles so that the comfort of the white family could be assured by a type of black female servant who (after slavery) was properly trained in the skills of nurturing, supporting, and caring about the well-being of white children ... and [ensure] that the black family had to become more patriarchal in its structure and values in order to resemble the slave owners’ households.”94 This history impacts the exclusion from labor law protections that leaves domestic workers “vulnerable to conditions of de facto servitude.”95 The purchase of low-wage caring labor from women of color by white class-privileged women in the United States has sustained a “racial division of reproductive labor,” a two-tier hierarchy among women.96 As this has become a transnational affair in recent decades, the employment of migrant women does not enable affluent women to enter the workforce, Barbara Ehrenreich and Hochschild insist, “it enables affluent men to avoid doing the second shift.”97

Hence ideological barriers to equality and the practice of motherhood itself now entail transnational dimensions. For the “globalization of the market economy has extended the politics of reproductive labor into an international level.”98 The “care drain” parallels colonial natural resource extraction with the commodity transferred 99 to the “embodied presence and affection of the caregiver.” Even as some women gain empowerment from being liberated from traditional roles and earning remittances abroad, migration typically entails “movement from one distinct patriarchal system to another, bound by race and class, in transnational capitalism.”100 The international transfer of such labor preserves the inequalities of the global market economy. For example, even as migrant domestic workers increase production in the receiving nation, the economic growth of the sending economy is limited and remains dependent upon the foreign currency provided by remittances of low wages.101 Moreover, as women transfer their reproductive labor to less privileged women, “the traditional division of labor in the patriarchal nuclear household has not been significantly renegotiated in various countries of the world,” and there remains a demand for transnational domestic workers in over one hundred countries today.102 For example, “A Filipina maid in Rome or a home health aide in Los Angeles can afford to pay an even poorer Filipina to care for her own family back home.”103 Hence global capitalism and patriarchy are macrostructural forces that shape the contemporary work of social production. An intersectional approach illuminates how ideas about masculinity,104 race, meritocracy, and individualism reinforce the gendered reproductive labor sustaining the pace and profits of the market economy.