The paradox of care and work in society from various perspectives
Our world today seems to be organized entirely around paid work. Over time, however, humanity has noticed that those who perform paid daily activities need care in order to be able to do them. Historically speaking, care work has been either unpaid, or on a barter basis (protection for care), or performed by slaves, servants, women, migrants, and all those who have ever been considered inferior.
The feminist waves have successively demanded voting rights (wave 1), the right to work and economic independence (wave 2), the right to decide on one’s own body (on maternity, sexuality and marriage) (wave 3), as well as the involvement of men in activities to protect women’s rights, through equal involvement in childcare and dependents’ care activities, as well as in the development of non-abusive, non-violent and non-dominant masculinities (NAVID) (wave 4).
Among groups of men and women concerned with feminism and the redefinition of NAVID masculinities, amid requests coming especially from the third feminist wave, a form of practice has emerged that rejects motherhood as an instrument of control, subjugation and limitation of women’s possibilities for identity and personal development. In the context of neoliberal economics and various combinations of capitalism and socialism, this rejection of motherhood sought to accrue to a variety of market mechanisms in search of a variety of solutions.
The result, however, is that these contexts end up rejecting not only motherhood but also forms of care central to life that do not include motherhood. Essentially, it appears to me as a new form of abuse because far from valuing care and nurturing, this new form seems to aim to cancel out the need for care and nurturing. When I say this I am not giving a pronatalist argument at all, but one about a general view over the place of care in our society. By placing care services on the paid labor market, the aim is to relieve productive individuals of the duties of care and nurturing. This appears instead of the alternative in which care responsibilities become central to the social order instead of productive labor performed on the labor market. If everyone (men and women) cared for someone (and engaged a little less in other forms work), there would be no need for the production of many of the goods and services that are now available on the labor market. On the other hand, solutions that promote care provided by third parties or by professional services essentially have the effect of minimizing the need for care. In this way, the valorization of care and nurturing as an essential form in the organization of life is not given the central role it actually has in people’s lives. Instead, its transfer to the paid labor market continues its devaluation (see statistics on the relative economic value of domestic work and care-giving professions relative to the hourly pay of these professions among other professions).
“Why is this a cancellation of the need for care and concern?” anyone might ask. It seems paradoxical, right? Isn’t care provided by professional third parties still care? My answer is: no. Anyone who has experienced professional care, even at the highest standards, knows that nothing compares to seeing your loved one or loved ones at your bedside, and their absence is a serious cause for anxiety, worry and unfulfillment. It is true that not all care-giving needs to be done by loved ones and not all by qualified personnel, but care is not just about paying for professional services, no matter how high their standards may be. For many people (for example, read Atul Gwande’s book “Being mortal”), what constitutes care and concern includes investing care actions with aspects of purpose, meaning and affection that hired personnel cannot fulfill. And these require development over time, with patience, affection, attention and appreciation to strengthen relationships. This is the part that the labor market cannot offer in its authentic forms. At the same time, care provided by close people cannot provide the standards of professional services. Yet another type of development over time, through learning, practice, training and development in the workplace is necessary to strengthen professional knowledge and skills in the areas of care and nursing.
Why does the paradox arise in a situation where the need for care is canceled by putting it on the labor market? For the same reasons why many other paradoxes arise, namely, the attempt to see a world that has multiple dimensions in one.
In this case, the independent dimensions that humanity is trying to reduce to one are production work and care work, which cannot be separated from each other. We can observe this because we have built entire societies based on one of them and we have observed that we continue to suffer, both women and men. Women suffer because care is not valued and men suffer because the only way they can benefit from care is by receiving it from other people, without being able to provide it to others or to themselves (at least if we refer to traditional models of masculinity). Caring about this situation, being aware of it, and acting to reduce this suffering are all acts of social compassion.
The same kind of compassion must be brought to bear when dealing with personal choices around work and personal life. It is important to recognize that there are great costs when the two are reduced to each other, whether we reduce work life to personal life or personal life to work life. However, this suffering can feels like suffering or not. Sometimes the connection between suffering and work-life conflict is felt, sometimes it is not. A decision consultant can help you discover these connections if they exist and can support you in the process of creating or discovering viable options that are aligned with your values and identity. In particular, a decision consultant can help you identify and avoid zero-sum situations, in which no matter what you do, you win on one side and lose on the other.
How does it feel for an individual?
Let’s see how these social phenomena are seen in a person’s story and what courses of action are available to a decision-making consultant.
Milena (reproduction with consent, paraphrasing and summary of various sessions): “I remember few times when I wanted to have children. When I was younger I was terrified by the horrors told by women who had gone through this experience in communist and post-communist Romania, as well as by the lack of care and compassion that surrounded the situations in which women recounted their experiences. Later, when I freed myself from this fear by identifying practical strategies to avoid unwanted experiences, I did not feel that I could offer what was required, as I am not a person oriented towards self-sacrifice or self-annihilation for other people, and I am driven by a lot of excitement for living life, exploration and personal interests. Later, I had frugal moments when I wanted to have a child, but I always had the certainty that they would pass and that was how things unfolded. In general, I noticed that at times when I felt loved and appreciated, respected and heard by my partner, I felt that I wanted to have children and later, when these behaviors stopped appearing in our couple life, my desire to have children also faded. Other times these desires appeared in the confrontation with death in various forms. However, I can’t say that I have ever wanted to have children under any circumstances. I always considered this attitude to be downright irresponsible. When I got out of the long-term relationship and met for the first time two examples of women who raised children and who also had a personal life and were also free from the toxic behaviors of their husbands (in various ways that did not only include separation from their husbands), I realized that there was hope. It was at this point that I had already accumulated a lot of life experience and I had begun to feel that I had a lot to offer as a mother. That was the moment I realized I would love to have a child, and the reason I would love to do so is because I would be curious to see what I could create and get to know this new being. I began wanting children, especially if I were raising him without a traditional husband, because I had learned about intentional communities and imagined that I could create or find one that was focused on childcare that would give me the support I needed to be able to care for the child sustainably, without having to abandon myself and without feeling resentful for putting myself in a situation I couldn’t and didn’t want to handle. At this point, I felt pressured by the fact that within feminist and alternative relationship practice groups, many members were declaring that they didn’t want to have children, some of whom were even opting for various forms of self-sterilization. Personally, while I understood where these options were coming from, I saw them as forms of self-mutilation. For me, as someone who doesn’t want to deny any part of myself, self-sterilization seemed like a new form of cutting off parts of myself in order to fit into a mold that doesn’t accept you as a whole. Accepting sexuality didn’t seem to lead to accepting motherhood. Even though I was aware of the importance that separating the two brought to women’s lives and mine, it’s important for me to separate them when I need to and connect them when I need to. Although these feminist groups claimed that their solution was different from the patriarchy I was fleeing, the result of not accepting myself in its entirety was still the same. From here came a form of disillusionment and disappointment with alternative relationship groups. It’s true that I saw only one couple who decided to have children while living an alternative lifestyle, but this was a mono-polyamorous couple, with everyone else having children as a result of periods of life spent in monogamous, patriarchal, and heterosexual relationships.
This is the point where I noticed that I didn’t want to have children in a patriarchal system if it meant abandoning myself in order to take care of a child, and in the non-patriarchal system where I would have wanted to have a child, I couldn’t find someone to have a child with because most people I met openly declared that they didn’t want children.
I felt this situation as an indirect punishment and a reiteration of ideas from the patriarchal world, in which the “bad wife” is abandoned because she is not obedient and is condemned to having the genes that led to this disobedience wiped out of the face of the earth. Thus, in the name of the system that declares itself to be for women’s rights, the most drastic solution is proposed, that of having a child alone if you want to have one, which is essentially very close to the patriarchal solution of having children with someone who will contribute little to care and who asks you to wipe your personality and personal desires so you can have children, for the simple fact that without help, it is almost impossible to provide care for the child and yourself. Only, this time it is an erasure by not having children. Essentially the effect is the same: erasing myself as an individual, within patriarchy by nullifying my beliefs, actions, interests and independent desires, and outside the patriarchy by having no one to raise a child with. Raising a child alone means sacrificing myself, refusing to raise a child alone means that even though I can find a community, if it is not interested in raising children, it still means erasing myself from the face of the earth. It seems to be a zero-sum game that I have not been able to get out of so far. I feel completely stuck in the face of these conflicts.”
The decision-making counselor’s contribution
This form of annulment of women’s self, either through the patriarchal version of motherhood through self-sacrifice as the only accepted form of motherhood, or through the version practiced in declared non-patriarchal communities that completely refuse motherhood on the grounds that it is to blame for sacrificing women’s personal development and identity, has a particularly interesting result: it conceals the real cause of what is undesirable . It is not motherhood that is undesirable in this context (although, obviously, it can be if we view it as a decision devoid of context or from other contexts different from this, such as, for example, the situations of indecision regarding motherhood described by Donath et al. ( 2022)), but the forms of abandonment and lack of care for women who give birth that are proliferated by both patriarchal relations and certain practices from the new wave of relations that fight against patriarchy.
What are these forms of abandonment and lack of care? In the case of patriarchal relationships, we have: Social isolation of new mothers (when they would like someone else to be with them during the day), lack of affection for the woman who exists beyond her quality as a mother (e.g. when everyone brings gifts for the newborn or these only reflect the quality as a mother, not that of a person with individual personal needs, different from those of the child), dismissing the suffering in the face of bodily and emotional changes and the mourning for the personal life that has ended, minimizing the needs of the woman beyond her status as a mother, submitting to choices that do not allow for self-development and child care at the same time, etc.
In the case of declared non-patriarchal relationships: the separation (sometimes experienced as a rupture) of sexual freedom from the freedom of motherhood, the separation of sexual freedom from intimacy, care and nurturing, the lack of affection for the mother who exists beyond the woman eager for development, knowledge and exploration, the discrediting of the suffering of losing a potentiality by submitting to a deconstruction process that does not seem to accept the case where motherhood or other concepts are irreducible (in some cases), the minimization of biological needs in the face of those of a social nature, the submission to choices that do not allow for neither self-development and the birth and care of children at the same time, nor the empowerment and freedom at the same time as accepting the vulnerabilities inherent in the act of giving birth and caring for children, etc.
The person who told the story above is experiencing a series of events on a personal level that have, on the one hand, a personal source and, on the other, a social source. If we focus only on one of these, it will not be possible for this person to achieve any level of fulfillment and release of pressure. Instead, a decision-making counselor will be able to identify and highlight both levels and discuss the possibilities of acting in the direction of each cause. Especially since each of these levels requires different actions and strategies. Even if „the personal is political”, as stated by Carol Hanish in 1969 in her famous discourse, the personal and the political requires different routes. Confusing the two will only lead to insatisfaction, frustration and heighthened individual pressure.
References:
Donath, Orna, Nitza Berkovitch, and Dorit Segal-Engelchin. 2022. “‘I Kind of Want to Want’: Women Who Are Undecided About Becoming Mothers.” Frontiers in Psychology 13 (April). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.848384.
Gawande, Atul. 2015. Being Mortal. Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End. Profile Books.
