Feminist Philosophies of Love and Work

Introduction

What fresh ways of thinking about love and work do we need? We take as uncontroversial among feminists that we need to move away from the dualistic view that women, love, altruism, and the family are, as a group, radically separate and opposite from men, self-interested rationality, work, and market exchange. The tough question is what to put in its place. In issuing the Call for Papers for this special issue of Hypatia, we challenged feminist thinkers in philosophy and other fields to reflect on this issue. What happens when work that involves intimacy—such as caring or sexuality—enters the market sector? Can work for a wage be an act of love, or is it inherently alienating? We took on this project in the belief that we need more adequate ways to think about work and money, and about love and emotion, to answer questions like these.

As nonphilosophers ourselves—England a sociologist and Nelson an economist—we have treasured the opportunity to pose these questions to scholars in a variety of disciplines. We asked authors to concentrate on conceptual issues, but encouraged them to use empirical material where relevant. We received papers from philosophers, political philosophers, sociologists, economists, and scholars of religious studies. We were gratified by the quantity and quality of papers we received in response to the call, and thankful for the generous help we received from many reviewers in philosophy and other disciplines.

While we were open to papers on unpaid work, as it happened, most of the submissions deal with paid work. As a result, we have identified two main themes that weave in and out of the papers that follow. One is the theme of markets, and the other the theme of relationships. Many of the papers examine what moral problems are created when love and money, or intimate relationships and markets, are combined. Our hope is that this collection, taken as a whole, will help move the discussion past the now-common template of condemning the “commodification of care” or “commodifkation of sexuality” to investigate more deeply what it means to be involved in markets, what it means to be involved in relationships, and how the two relate to each other. As we intend the title of this volume to suggest, we believe that combining love and work may be a “both-and” possibility in ways not yet adequately explored.

Markets

The essays collected here demonstrate a diversity of attitudes toward markets. Authors mean slightly different things by “markets,” but the differences go deeper than that. Some essays roundly criticize contemporary, capitalist systems of organization and exchange. Julia O'Connell Davidson's analysis of prostitution, for example, takes the Marxist view that all wage labor, and not just sexualized wage labor, inherently involves issues of exploitative power and objectification that any individual would resist, if given the chance (“people ‘choose’ neither wage labor nor prostitution unless denied access to alternative means of subsistence”). Christine Williams comments that respectful employer/employee relations are unlikely “under capitalist conditions.” Virginia Held argues for limiting the reach of markets and market values, claiming that corporate motivations of maximum economic gain are inimical to concerns of care. Dawn Rae Davis expresses concern about the “financialization of the globe.” Attending many such claims is a fear of “commodification.” Sometimes the fear is based on the belief that any activity will be somehow drained of social and moral meaning, and of love, when it enters the market—when doing the activity is related to money changing hands. Sometimes the fear is more specifically that workers are harmed when they have to “sell” a part of themselves, and that this alienation will be worse the more intimate is the part of the self involved in the activity. Sometimes the fear is that those for whom the activity is done, such as children, the sick, or elders, will not get the same quality of tender loving care from paid workers as from loving family members. In any case, an activity's entry into the market arena in which it is done for a wage is seen to convert it to just another means of maximizing profit.

Several of the chapters do not reject markets whole cloth, but struggle with moral problems within them. Cameron Macdonald and David Merrill's chapter addresses issues of organizing child care workers within the current political-economic configuration. Gabrielle Meagher is even slightly positive about domestic work done through market relations. Iulie Aslaksen raises the possibility of ethical investment within, presumably, a system of privately owned and directed financial capital. Anne Klein's chapter on bringing love and spirituality into writing does not comment on commodification as a problematic. These writers are not unconcerned about inequality and suffering, but deal with them as problems within a system, rather than structural problems of the system to be remedied only by escaping the market sphere into a wholly separate sphere, or by the coming of “the revolution.”

An interdisciplinary conversation about what is ethically wrong and right with markets should lead to interesting discussion among feminists. But we often find that differences in attitude and rhetoric preclude rather than encourage dialogue between those who assume markets are evil, and those who see them as a mixed blessing. Some feminists, while critical of the androcentric biases of orthodox Marxism, assume that it hardly needs stating that capitalism is evil. With this as a basic assumption, they rarely feel the need to engage in discussions about what, in particular, is wrong. They tend to assume that anyone who does not share this wholesale rejection is insufficiently critical, and probably callous toward others' economic suffering as well. On the other hand, those engaged in progressive—and often empirical—work within a context of market economics (with some form of democratic government) tend to dismiss the former as idealists, stuck in outdated formulaic pronouncements and disengaged from the pragmatic considerations of actual contemporary life.

Our plea is that we eschew condemning each other and keep talking. The conversation is urgent because for us as feminists these questions pose more difficult issues than they do for, say, nonfeminist communitarians. The latter may be comfortable arguing for returning caring functions to the family, to be done out of obligation and love rather than money. But as feminist scholars, we realize that unless men could be persuaded to take on their fair share of family caring labor (and while seeing this as difficult to achieve, we certainly support this goal), the “private” alternative is that care is women's obligation within the patriarchal family. Another alternative might be to have these tasks done for pay, but within state supported or nonprofit organizations rather than in the corporate for-profit sector, as favored by Held and Tronto. Here caring functions would be in some sense in the market (workers enter a labor market and work for a wage), but not in capitalist, for-profit enterprises. Thus, debate often centers on what the appropriate sector is for an activity. While we think this a helpful discussion, we want to go deeper and examine what it is, more specifically, about activities and their settings that cause particular kinds of moral problems. We want to unpack notions of “markets” and “capitalism,” and seek increased clarity in naming the moral problems that worry many of us.

First, it is important to distinguish between the abstract theoretical concepts of Market, Corporation, and Capitalism, and how capitalist firms and others involved in market transactions actually behave in the real world. Mainstream economists assert that firms are guided solely by the principle of profit maximization, that their internal workings are characterized by hierarchies of control, and that their actions are largely determined by inexorable forces of market competition. They assume that individuals in markets are self-interested and rational. We should remember, however, that this characterization of firms and markets is a model, not a description from life. Just as feminists in all disciplines have pointed out the social construction of gender, feminist economists and sociologists have pointed out the social construction of this model. This description of a mechanism-driven economy shares the theoretical presuppositions of the Enlightenment image of a clockwork nature, based in masculinist-biased dreams of separation and control. Our own work has pointed out how such notions enshrine the image of the “separative self”—homo economicus and his relatives in liberal political theory—while implicitly demanding that “soluble selves” take on, in an invisible and subordinate way, the split-off characteristics of nurturance, interdependence, and emotion (England 1993; Nelson 1992). Such a splitting of the world into two involves, as Williams and Aslaksen discuss in this volume, a negation of the possibility of real mutuality in relationship. Instead of acknowledging both constitution in relationship and individual uniqueness, the separative/soluble regime allows only for mechanical interaction and hierarchical control, in economic relations as elsewhere.

Recognizing, then, the abstractions of Market and Capitalism to be, at least in part, about habitual ways of viewing the world, can feminist analysis do better? Would letting go of some of this rhetoric allow for more adequate attention to pressing concerns of human suffering, inequality, and exploitation? We believe so.

First, while the standard model of Markets would have us think in terms of law-driven relations among self-interested agents buying or selling commodities, we can recognize actual markets as evolving systems of complex, structured relations among multidimensional people. Standard economic theory would have us think that people drop their emotions, their values, and even (in the case of workers) their individual will at the threshold of market interactions. But how could this possibly be true? By not taking this as a given, we can let feminist insights into the relational and emotional constitution of humans be applied also to behavior in places where people do work for which they receive pay.

Second, this reformulation helps us avoid unhelpful dualistic thinking of the sort that feminist thinkers have long questioned in other areas. Believing that the broad swath of human values and motivations (other than profit maximization, which is itself a value, and narrow self-interest, itself a motivation) can only exist outside of some large, mechanical realm that we call the Market tends to lead to some unattractive conclusions. One danger is that we might give up any hope for correcting moral problems in the sorts of workplaces where a majority of people spend many of their waking hours, letting this sector “off the hook” in terms of moral responsibility in the here and now. Believing that we must quarantine caring and intimate values from the infection of markets by keeping them in some separate sphere also implies a vision of a fallen world of an evil elite “them,” opposed by the forces of a virtuous but downtrodden “us.” Feminists have pointed out the dangers of such adversarial/victim thinking in other areas. We believe that it is neither consistent nor helpful to maintain such thinking when it comes to examining problems of economic organization.

Third, empirical research in sociology and organizational studies does not support the notion that economies are made up of impersonal interactions of profit-maximizing firms, or at least are inexorably driven toward this by competitive pressures. Such research reveals the importance of complex incommensurable values, beliefs, and concrete social networks of particularistic connections in actual business, management, and markets (see, for example, Nohria and Eccles 1992). The orthodox Marxist forecast that, short of “the revolution,” there will be an inexorable advance of a completely commodified, instrumental capitalist world must be recognized as what it is, an article of faith (notwithstanding the attempt of some to give it an aura of scientifically-proven certainty). Advances in that direction can sometimes be empirically documented, it is true, but a belief in inexorability requires a corresponding disbelief in resistance and resilience.²

So what is it about contemporary economic life that most feminists find problematic? Instead of the overbroad shorthand of using terms like Market and Capitalism to simultaneously refer to an abstractly conceived source of evil and to actual systems of contemporary organization, perhaps we would find more agreement and progress if we worked harder to carefully delineate and name the issues of pressing concern. Upon reflection, it seems that the real items of concern are values, actions, power relations, and world views that, while rooted in the abstract model of the Market, in actual life may be just as much manifested in other sectors of social life, and may vary in the degree to which they characterize relationships in actual markets.

We can think of a number of examples. We may believe that greed (a sense that no amount of goods, services, and status, is enough) leads people to tenaciously defend social structures that uphold their privilege and to be less generous to those with less than we would prefer. Resulting inequalities cause real suffering at the bottom and insecurity at all levels, as discussed by Aslaksen. But greed can exist not only in markets, but also in informal, private relations within kin groups, and we should acknowledge that as we name it as a problem. Or to take another example, we may feel that a value structure that encourages profits to be prioritized above all else drives out other values, such as concern for the environment. Financial-gain-above-all, then, may be a more suitable target than trying to get rid of the for-profit sector per se: some successful for-profit firms seek only “reasonable” profit along with social goals (Collins and Porras 1994), while some non-profit and state organizations give unseemly priority to increasing the compensation of their top managers. We may feel that too much inequality of power is dangerous for those on the bottom of hierarchies. Then we should name this problem and try to understand the source of power, but acknowledge that power-over dynamics happen in both markets and private relations (indeed, as Williams points out, even in intimate sexual relations involving some love). If we find it degrading to be manipulated as consumers by corporate advertising, then we should also be concerned about how the narrow view of students as “consumers” changes education in the state and non-profit sector. Poverty, excessive inequality, concentration of power, lack of dignity in work, environmental degradation, and other problems can be identified as moral bads without the totalizing view that the inexorable logic of markets takes us down a slippery slope to hell.

This sort of more nuanced analysis changes the ground on which love and work can be discussed. Instead of the “commodification” formulation that fears (good) care or sex becoming corrupted by (bad) markets, one can ask more specifically about what kind of structures, values, and relations manifested in actual organizations—families, communities, non-profits, for-profits, governments and international bodies—work to ameliorate, or to worsen, the problems of concern. In this, we may find much of help in the feminist analysis of relationships.

Relationships

The other theme running through these collected chapters is that of relationships, particularly the relation of self to other. How do we characterize relationships of employers to employees, when the work involves some kind of intimacy? Held, and Macdonald and Merrill, explore this for the case of caring work; Tronto and Meagher for domestic services; Davidson and Williams for sex work. Or how is a caring worker perceived by her social peers—do they devalue caring work, put it on a moral pedestal, or both? What is the relation between a care worker and a dependent person cared for? Or the relation of two women literally continents apart, where one is supposedly a benefactor and the other supposedly receiving something helpful, as discussed by Davis? Or the relation of a person to her work, and in particular her writing, as addressed by Klein? Or one's relationship to oneself, in terms of self-respect or self-concept (Macdonald and Merrill, Meagher, Williams, Klein, Aslaksen)?

In the interest of creating a framework for discussion of the papers, and also of moving forward feminist analysis of relationship, we suggest the following initial rough typology of images of relation:

This typology is also in some sense a continuum—from absolute individuality, to a relation of distance and inequality, to a relation of closeness and equality, and finally to merger.

The separative self, for whom relations are fundamentally irrelevant, is the assumed homo economicus of the Market model discussed above (and also discussed in Davidson's references to liberal theory, and Davis's references to the Enlightenment “him”). The critiques of this are well known in feminist theory. We wonder, however, whether this image might not also be somehow echoed in Davidson's notion of the self-sufficient sexual subject who feels affirmed in choosing masturbation over hiring a prostitute. Agreeing with Davidson that the potentially self-loving practice of masturbation has been inappropriately denigrated, we can still ask whether she is holding up an ideal of self-sufficiency in the sexual arena. Perhaps this is a reflection of her use of the Marxist tradition, which seems likewise to hold onto an ideal of work in which the worker must retain complete autonomy and control. Similarly, we wonder if Davis's stress on the “impossibility” of knowing the other might put too much emphasis on boundaries that separate.

The hierarchical model takes two forms. One is structural and coolly contractual. Both standard economic theory and Davidson tell us that in a labor contract, a worker puts him or herself into a position to be commanded, at least within some bounds. Another kind of hierarchical relationship is more intimate. In it, one person may get emotional satisfaction from having the other take a servile stance. Tronto worries that professional women hiring other women as domestic servants sometimes take this attitude, and that it is harmful to the self-respect of the workers. The sadomasochism discussed by Williams also involves a perceived emotional kick for both sides of the domination/submission relationship, even while it is ultimately unfulfilling.

How can relationships entail mutual recognition and respect? Several of the papers wrestle with this question. The possibility of relations of mutual recognition is the topic of psychoanalytic work reviewed by Williams, who notes that sadomasochistic relations are the opposite of mutuality. “Love” relations, or at least relations of mutual respect, are most easily imagined when partners have fairly equal power and status. Nancy Eraser's discussion of “recognition,” for example, drawn on by Macdonald and Merrill in this volume, defines recognition as “constituting actors as peers, capable of participating on a par with one another in social life” (2000, 113). Some authors discuss the situations or structures in which they think such mutually respectful relations are not possible. Are they impossible in “markets” (Davidson, Held), in homes as work-places (Tronto), in extremely hierarchical organizations (Williams), or when the people come together across continents and economic or racial difference (Davis)? The question of impossibility seems to arise whenever actors are seen as positioned in relations of asymmetric status or power.

At the holistic extreme of models of relation is merger or union. Can this ever be a healthy model of relationship? There is good reason for feminists to be nervous about this model. After all, the “autonomous” self of classical liberal political and economic theory (originally presumed male but extended to women in liberal feminism) really cannot exist without someone (generally female and/or of a subordinate class or race) who is entirely “soluble”—that is, whose individual identity is effaced in the service of dependents and the allegedly autonomous actors. If a person oriented toward merger meets a selfish actor who denies his or her own dependency, will the result not be the subordination of the union-oriented person? Consistent with such a concern, Davis's discussion of the “union” in love of the “affective subject of idealist and romantic traditions” points out its implicit motif of possession. Similarly, Williams counterposes the separative drive for omnipotence with the also appealing (because tension-reducing) but subordinating drive for merging, and points out the unhealthy form of sexual relationship that can result. Aslaksen classifies “self-sacrifice” as a negative attribute. On the other hand, while feminists are warranted in their worry about mergers that subordinate one party, Klein, drawing on the notion of “no self” from Buddhist psychology, and her own meditative practice, poetically depicts a view of mystical merger of self with words and other beings that seems to empower and enrich rather than subordinate.³ We suspect that there are “cheap” forms of merger that risk dominance/martyrdom, but also more skillful forms that enrich both self and other yet always alternate with more differentiated modes of mutuality in which each person knows some boundaries of the self.

In philosophical discussions of love and work, the first two relational models (separatism and hierarchy) are usually associated with “work,” and the last two (mutuality and merger) with “love.” The analysis suggested above, in which we consider that people bring their multi-dimensional selves, and not just certain aspects and motivations, into work, challenges this dichotomy.

Even in the workplace that a socialist feminist might find ideal, surely we would find at least some division of labor and leadership. And even if there is no structured hierarchy of authority, it is in the nature of people working together that each person cannot remain despotically self-directed at all times. Need asymmetric relations in workplaces be framed purely in terms of the hierarchical model of control?

If mutual respect can only occur among “peers, capable of participating on a par with one another in social life” (Fraser 2000, 113), this seems to preclude the possibility of recognition and respect in relations of differentiation and dependence. Yet such relations, as between child and caregiver, have traditionally been a large part of many women's lives. Surely we believe that these relations involve both love and some measure of legitimate authority. The caregiver must take a more directive role than the child for the child's protection and flourishing. A forty-year-old and a six-year old are not “peers,” nor can they participate “on a par.” Other examples of such status distinctions abound: student and teacher, prisoner and guard, worker and manager, psychiatric patient and nurse. While one can—and should—deplore the lack of respect which too often characterizes such relations in actuality, Nancy Fraser's (2000) reasoning would seem to have us go farther, finding “misrecognition” in status differentiation per se. Her “recognition,” it seems, may only be possible in a world of no dependencies. Need relations of recognition and respect be framed only in terms of a model of complete symmetry?

This discussion suggests that we might consider a new entry for the above typology, located between hierarchy and egalitarian mutuality:

A strict egalitarian will, of course, have an immediate visceral reaction against such a notion, and claim that it is not possible. It is hard to understand how one could be strictly egalitarian, however, while simultaneously keeping in mind the traditional work of mothers, nurses, and teachers, and the needs of the young, sick, and uneducated. If asymmetric mutual recognition is impossible, then the vulnerable dependent, or the nurturing caregiver, or both, must always and everywhere be disrespected. Disrespect would be an inexorable part of the human condition. While strict egalitarianism can only exist among separative, self-sufficient selves, we believe that a key insight of feminist analysis is that such selves are a myth. Mutuality with and without symmetry may in fact be ontogenically related: many claim that the ability of adults to form mutually respectful relations with peers is rooted in healthy, self and other-respecting dynamics experienced in the asymmetric relations of childhood.⁴ Instead of relations among people of equal standing as the norm, onto which dependencies can be tacked at the margin, the existence of vulnerabilities in childhood suggests that asymmetric mutuality is an important part of the human condition.

What about asymmetric mutuality among adults, especially in the workplace?Consider a business, a university, or even a feminist organization in which people join together on a project. Some amount of leadership structure, differentiated roles, and specialized knowledge will be necessary, to avoid what one early second-wave feminist called the “tyranny of structurelessness” (Joreen [Jo Freeman] 1973). Once we note the illusory nature of the notion of absolute autonomy, mutual respect even if within asymmetry becomes a more appealing alternative as a goal for the kinds of organizations in which we actually live.

This is not to deny that mutuality may become more difficult as hierarchy is more extreme. Williams discusses specific aspects of organizations that make them more or less likely to encourage dynamics of domination and abnegation. Citing the work of Lynn Chancer (1992), Williams writes that bureaucracies with “flatter hierarchies, democratic participation, job security, just rewards and equitable punishments, an acknowledgment of mutual dependency, and a more trusting attitude between supervisors and workers” make, in the vocabulary introduced here, more mutual, if asymmetric, recognition possible. Meagher, as well, raises the possibility that wage workers may feel respect and pride in their work, and even within asymmetric authority relations may yet be able to “be who they are.” In Macdonald and Merrill's discussion of intersubjective recognition between a parent and a child care worker, they see hope for parents coming to respect the caregivers and their skills, and for the caregivers taking pride in their abilities.

Or what about mutual respect across large divides of space, power, and resources? Davis, in struggling with the question of how Northern feminists could genuinely be of service to women in countries of the South, questions the model of the imperialistic “benefactor” who needs, in the words of Spivak, to first “make the heathen into a human” so that “he can be treated as an end in himself” (1999, 123). How can one love, if, as Davis writes, “love is the impossible experience of knowing across radical difference”?

What can ground such an impossible project? We get a hint, from the works of Davis, Klein, and Aslaksen, that analytical thought will be too thin, and moral “rules” too lifeless, to form the basis of such love across great divides. Davis believes it will depend on our “ability to engage with what escapes proposition and representation.” Klein writes that the relation between work and love is “isomorphic to the forces that rend from each other doing and being, speech and silence, constricted form and spacious emptiness.” Aslaksen draws on myth and fairy tale. Love spills out over our academic categories, over our ability to speak.

Love And Work

How can we have love and work together? Can asymmetric relations (for example, buyer/seller or employer/worker) be other than harmfully hierarchical? Can relations including the flow of money be other than cold? Is it possible for market relations to be relations of mutual recognition and respect, symmetric or asymmetric? If the answer these questions is “no,” then the marketization of any service leads directly to a draining of human meaning and loss of dignity, as suggested in the literature on “commodification.” The nearly allergic reaction of many feminists to talk of money and markets would be justified.

If the answer, however, is “yes, under some conditions” then the question shifts to how relations, including market relations—relations not dictated by some abstraction, but actively constructed in individual, social and political struggle—could be structured and lived in order to increase the possibility of mutual recognition and fair distribution, and decrease the likelihood of oppression, domination, and poverty.

In some cases, the practical answer might turn out to be the same as that coming from a love vs. work perspective. Upon careful consideration, it could be concluded that particular aspects of caregiving, sexual activity, reproduction, or any other activity are not well-served by market structures, and that they are best done by government, in the nonprofit sector, by families or other informal groups, or by some other structure not yet invented. Or we could decide that market elements should play only a small part within some appropriate form of organization.

Markets, thinly defined as decentralized arrangements of monetized exchange, have some advantages. They allow for a flow of information in terms of prices and volumes of sales that encourage producers to respond flexibly to consumers' desires. Profit provides feedback to owners about whether resources are being transformed from less (market)-valuable to more (market)-valuable forms. We have heard tell of a Russian feminist at an American feminist conference, who held up a tampon to make a point about economic systems. Russian women hadn't had access to these because the top men in the centralized bureaucracy didn't make them a priority; the top dogs of American capitalism are also men, but because a market system showed them there were profits to be made in tampons, they were produced. Markets also provide a channel in which people with new ideas about goods and services might test them out, and allow people a certain freedom in individual decision-making about the activities in which they will engage.

Markets also have many disadvantages: consumers' desires are manifested in markets in proportion to their incomes, so that the needs of those with less resources register less. Consumer desires can be manipulated through advertising. Markets have no inherent corrections for maldistribution of resources or excessive concentration of economic power. They do not do well in protecting the environment, because the costs of environmental damage rarely rebound fully on those who inflict it. Because of all these, market value can hence easily diverge from human value.

Actual markets, however, are much more than the thin definition implies, since no actual market exists without a legal and institutional infrastructure, traditions and norms, ties of information and affect, and real, multidimensional, warm-bodied people. Actual markets are social organizations, embedded in larger social organizations. And of course, other modes of organization (for example, states, informal communities) may sometimes solve these problems better, but they do not always do so, and they may be afflicted with many of the same problems.

Recasting the question as one of how love and work can go together, as people live integrated, integral lives—instead of casting it as a question of how a sphere of mutually respectful and caring relations can be protected from a sphere of greed-driven markets—has many advantages. Problems can be named correctly: domination, oppression, greed, poverty, cold-heartedness, servility, and excessive and illegitimate differences in power, status, and resources. The spheres of life in which these problems can occur can be correctly identified: all spheres.

Summary of Articles

A first group of papers addresses the issues that arise when market life overlaps with those realms most associated with love and personal identity, such as caring for children, keeping a home, and sexuality.

For philosopher Virginia Held, the problem with market activity is that for-profit firms are governed by a value of maximizing economic gain. She does not argue against, for example, the existence of child care centers that hire workers to care for children, even though that requires the creation of a labor market for child care providers. Nor does she think that the care provided by paid care workers is always inferior to that provided in the family at home. What is important, in her view, is that organizations providing child care be guided by valuing the healthy development of children, organizations providing education or health care be guided by educational or health care values, and so forth. Arguing that corporations will not be guided by these values, she is de facto favoring more activities being done in the not-for-profit sector or by government. Held suggests that the emerging feminist ethic of care, with its ontological and moral privileging of relationships, may help us decide where to put the appropriate boundaries around for-profit markets. While she does not give up hope that the rest of the economy could be guided more than at present by concerns of care, her main concern in the paper is to argue for shrinking rather than expanding the role of the market.

Joan Tronto, a political theorist, focuses on a market where the buyer and seller meet on the “private” terrain of the buyer's home—when professional women (often with their husbands) purchase full-time, in-home care for their children. Is there something morally problematic about hiring another woman to do this work? Tronto believes there is. She argues that this work is inherently exploitative because these domestic workers are in someone else's home. As a result of this location, there is a forced intimacy, domestic workers are expected to reflect the values of their employers which may be alienating, the amount of compliance expected of them may be greater than on other jobs, and both emotional bonds with their charges and a lack of recourse to bureaucratic authorities or unions make resistance difficult. Being a live-in domestic worker is the extreme case of these problems, giving a woman little control over her leisure time and perhaps keeping her from living with her own children. The fact that many of the women doing this caring labor are women of color makes the practice even more worrisome for Tronto. She takes parents to task for falling into the trap of “competitive mothering,” which operates to make things done for their children's benefit seem morally unquestionable. She points toward a less individualistic way of thinking about responsibility for care.

In contrast, political economist Gabrielle Meagher argues that paying for housework need not compromise the moral integrity of the buyer and the dignity and well-being of the seller. Meagher concedes that this situation is perhaps more open to abuse that other work in a capitalist economy because of its personal nature, but argues that abuse is less likely to occur when personalized, even feudal, systems of servitude are replaced by contracts that specify what services will be provided and under what terms. Reviewing the argument that what a householder is actually buying is high-status person vis à vis a servile worker, Meagher points to ethnographic research indicating that many workers do not feel that there is something inherently degrading about the work. Finally, she examines the argument that doing our own self-maintenance creates a bulwark against further encroachment of capitalist rationalization into our lives. She finds this unconvincing, since people may hire a housecleaner so they can spend more, rather than less, time on activities with noninstrumental and caring aspects, such as time with their children or in volunteer work. However, having studied household cleaners herself, she is acutely aware that their lives are often very difficult. She points toward formalization of working arrangements, and examination of the overall distribution of income, as options to be preferred to simply refusing to hire housecleaners (which, in the short run, only leaves them unemployed).

Sociologists Cameron Macdonald and David Merrill have studied collective action by paid child care workers. Reflecting on their empirical work, they use Nancy Fraser's (2000) conceptual distinction between struggles for recognition and for redistribution to conceptualize the issues in these campaigns. Care workers make claims both in a “vocabulary of virtue,” that focuses on their genuine investment of themselves in caring for the children they tend, and in a “vocabulary of skill,” that focuses on training, credentials, and measurable tasks and outcomes. Unlike Fraser, however, whose analysis dismisses intersubjective and psychological notions of recognition in favor of institutional recognition alone, Macdonald and Merrill argue for both kinds of recognition. Not only does the importance of loving attachments need to be institutionally recognized and characterized as skill (for example, in job evaluation studies) for change to occur, but these attachments need to be intersubjectively recognized as valuable by the caregivers themselves, their close associates, and the parents. Only when workers and parents recognize that this work is skilled in both its emotional and educational aspects, can they mobilize to redistribute resources toward better pay. They illustrate their points with excerpts taken from interviews with childcare organizers and advocates.

While the question of housework and child care divides feminists, as we have seen above, the issue of sexuality in the workplace is another topic of vigorous debate.

Sociologist Julia O'Connell Davidson examines whether allowing a market for prostitution inherently exploits the sex worker. She reviews schools of thought that find sex work unproblematic. Liberal thought sees prostitution as acceptable, she argues, as long as the worker is formally free to enter or leave the employment contract. “Sex radicals” praise prostitution for challenging the boundaries of normativity in favor of erotic diversity. Others argue in favor of allowing a market for sex work on the basis of the buyers’“needs” for sexual services. Following a line of reasoning with Marxist overtones, however, Davidson disagrees with these positions. Prostitution is morally problematic, she argues, because the buyer gets to be the despot-subject while the sex worker's sexual desires are irrelevant to what happens. Rather than hinging her critique on showing how sex work is different from other work, then, she rests most of her critique on the similarity between what is wrong with sex work and what is wrong with work in general in market capitalism. In both cases, the worker has to give over control of herself or himself. Arguing that prostitution is by its nature exploitative, Davidson suggests that if there were not such a cultural taboo against masturbation, we might see this form of sexuality as appropriately meeting the sexual needs of people who find themselves without a partner.

Sociologist Christine Williams draws from psychoanalytic theory, which has had a troubled relationship with feminism and her discipline, in her exploration of sexual harassment. She uses the concepts of ambivalence and sadomasochism to explore why many women who experience distressing sexual behaviors, such as students mistreated by faculty, are reluctant to identify it as “harassment,” and why some women compete for highly sexualized jobs. Williams argues that in such situations, women are neither agents of free choice nor passive victims, but are caught up as ambivalently willing victims in a sadomasochistic dynamic. Ambivalence comes about because in situations of high dependency (such as childhood), people experience both strong love and strong hate. When this is eroticized, it elicits a sadomasochistic dynamic wherein the dependent person feels weak and unworthy, and accepts control and mistreatment by the sadist, who both people consider to be stronger and more deserving. The sociological part of Williams's analysis is her detailing of the characteristics that make workplaces more, or less, likely to encourage this dynamic. Harassment is more likely when there is a rigid hierarchy, when those who are in lower positions are restrained in their autonomy and freedom of expression, when superordinates refuse to acknowledge their dependence on subordinates, and when supervisors feel insecure about their own positions. The opposite of a sadomasochistic relationship is one that involves mutual recognition, and Williams argues that the way past sexual harassment lies in restructuring workplaces to encourage more mutually respectful relationships.

Rather than taking as their problematic the interface between traditional reams of intimacy and marketization, the last set of articles in this volume explores other aspects of love and work, particularly with regard to notions of selfhood. Aslaksen examines notions of the self with reference to economic investment, Klein with reference to the work of writing, and Davis with reference to vast disparities in economic and political resources.

Iulie Aslaksen, an economist, considers the possibility of a “generous economic actor.” She holds out hope that behavior in markets can take the other actors’ well-being into account, rather than being driven entirely by greed. In this piece she departs radically from the mainstream of her discipline, drawing upon the work of other feminist economists, psychoanalytic theory, and mythology to examine the gendered and psychic background of different visions of economic motivation. Arguing that norms of greed or self-sacrifice correspond to images of (masculine) isolated or (feminine) engulfed selves, respectively, she points toward an alternative conception of “individuals in relation.”⁵ Applying this to economic life, she paints a picture of economic actors who can be both self-interested (in a healthy way) and generous. Aslaksen uses psychoanalytic theory and mythology to elaborate on the ties between greed and insecurity, and discusses the obligations implied by gift-giving using work by feminist and other scholars. In her final section, she discusses how the ethical investment movement may provide a means for balancing self-interest and moral responsibility.

Anne C. Klein's field is Religious Studies, with a focus on the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Her piece is written in a style different from most academic articles, and we have found that we take something else from it each time we read it. In it, she raises a deeper issue about the self. Rather than focusing on self and other (as in most of the earlier articles in this volume), she looks at the relationship between the subjective self and its objects. To exemplify this relationship, she draws attention to the self's relationship with the words that form the texts one composes and the thoughts one thinks. As a scholar, practitioner of meditation, and oral translator for Tibetan meditation teachers, she reflects on her own relationship to the words they speak and the texts about which they speak. The separation we usually feel from the objects of perception, especially those that constitute our “work,” including our academic work, is part of what makes the process feel like work. This sensibility is particularly difficult to escape when the object in question is words, which by their nature make distinctions and foster separation. Yet Klein argues that even when we work with words, it is possible to stay in touch with the unbounded unity that underlies all being. To do this requires openness that is, she suggests, profoundly analogous to love.

Dawn Rae Davis, a Ph.D. candidate in Feminist Studies, draws from post-structuralist and post-colonial feminist theory to question the possibility of an ethical relationship of love between women in radically different global locations. Some feminists have valorized care, love, and intimacy. Others encourage Western feminists to care about the well-being of women in poorer nations. Yet, Davis warns against putting these injunctions together in a simple way. After all, she points out, advocates of colonialism often tried to justify the violence on the grounds of concern for those who needed civilizing and Christianizing. Why do we think that we will do any better in understanding the lives and needs of women whose situations are so different from our own? Davis encourages us to give up the optimistic notion that “there is a correct set of rules, accessible beforehand, by which feminist knowing may result in beneficial outcomes for both sides.” Using Spivak's term, “ethical singularity,” she argues that in every encounter, while much is disclosed, there is also some secret that is not revealed. It is out of respect for this “secret” that Davis recommends that we cultivate the ability to act without presuming that we really understand or even know how to understand the other. She argues that with this epistemological attitude, feminism may hope to reclaim love for emancipatory rather than colonial purposes.

Notes

Julie Nelson gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Fellowship for Research on Caring Labor, the Foundation for Child Development, and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. Paula England acknowledges financial support from the MacArthur Foundation's Network on the Family and the Economy. We both thank Nancy Tuana and Nancy Folbre for stimulating our thinking on these topics.