Alternately sentimentalised and patronised, today caring is widely perceived as a second-tier occupation for those who cannot or will not aim higher. Matt Hancock has now splashily pledged to recruit more care workers, get more PPE into care homes and send care workers a nice green badge that will enable them to access free coffees and other discounts. It is trumpeted as ‘Victory for our heroic carers’. Call me cynical, but a cutesy badge is hardly going to do much to redress the widespread perception of caring as low status.
Women’s liberation has, so far, turned out to be mostly for the middle and upper classes: we went from half the human population performing caring roles, regardless of class, to a large proportion of the middle and upper classes outsourcing care to poorer women, migrants and other groups perceived as lower status.
Lockdown is mercilessly exposing our collective delusions. As professional double-earner families are stripped of the ability to buy in domestic services or even lean on extended family, it has revealed the fragility of upper-middle-class professional ‘liberation’ from domesticity. It has also illustrated the patchiness of modern men’s willingness to “lean in” to caring duties in the family as women have leaned into the workplace.
And it has laid bare the uncomfortably mixed feelings we have about those workers who have taken on the caring obligations formerly seen as “women’s work”. Plenty have pointed out the irony of MPs clapping for NHS nurses barely two years after voting against giving them a pay rise — but it’s not just Tory MPs that treats caring roles the way the 1950s treated housewives. It’s the entire professional class, regardless of sex.
It’s worth asking, then, why this devaluation of care is so persistent. How have we gone from alternately sentimentalising and stifling housewives to alternately sentimentalising and underpaying care home workers and nurses? The answer, I suspect, is that we don’t want to hear what carers have to tell us about our own fragility.
Today, mainstream culture places the greatest value on freedom and self-reliance. As Destiny’s Child put it in their hit “Independent Women”, a song lauded as a modern feminist anthem for women casting off the shackles of dependency on men: “The rock I’m rockin’, I bought it/’Cause I depend on me.”
It’s a view with some centuries of history: in The Social Contract (1762) Jean-Jaques Rousseau, grandfather of much of the modern liberal mindset, described freedom as humanity’s natural state and the ultimate goal of good government. Dependency, meanwhile, was degrading: in Emile, published the same year, he wrote that it “engenders all the vices”. Far better, as Destiny’s Child advises, to “Depend on no-one else to give you what you want”.
But if dependency is degrading, how are we to account for the helplessness we all experience at the beginning of life, and usually at its end? I suspect that this is at the root of our complicated love-hate relationship with care. After all, however proudly we assert our independence as adults, at some point in our past we were helpless in the arms of our mothers or carers. And the likelihood is that as we age or become ill, we will be helpless again, at the hands of nurses or care workers.
No one likes being told that their most cherished ideals are built on sand. So we ignore what our need for care workers implies about our own fragility, #ClapForCarers every Thursday, and underpay them every other day of the week. Or we mouth platitudes about how marvellous mothers are, while making every effort to avoid having to talk to them at parties.
The liberation of middle-class women from domestic life did not result in the disappearance of caring work but its displacement onto less wealthy women. It was a revolution for those women capable of becoming QCs, not those women who become the nannies who care for the children of QCs while they work. The husbands of those QCs were thus able to continue their professional lives along lines largely unchanged since Betty Friedan’s day, undisturbed by any notable increase in domestic obligations.
Now coronavirus has provided a brutal lesson in where the buck stops. The government rules on eligibility for furlough cover people whose caring obligations leave them unable to carry on working under lockdown. Meanwhile, schools and childcare are kept open for those whose jobs designate them as “key workers”. These roles — including carers, nurses and nursery workers — are overwhelmingly working class.
This in turn highlights what we probably secretly knew anyway: that however we undervalue and underpay caring work, ultimately in a zero-sum conflict between higher-status work and caring for loved ones it is the latter which counts. We should reflect on this, next time we have a national debate about the pay scales of nurses relative to their managers.
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