AP PHOTO / PAUL SAKUMAwho declared the “end of welfare as we know it” and re-
quired that most women seeking benefits work. (The work
of raising children didn’t count.) His brand of austerity was
meant to court so-called moderates who cared about the
federal deficit. Today, as a result, everything from welfare
to health care to child care has languished. What the state
no longer provides, individuals and families must—and
those providers tend to be women.
At the same time, real wages have fallen since the 1970s,
burdening workers even more. The family wage is no
longer even an aspirational norm; these days, everybody
has to work, and too many struggle to get by without even
a living wage. Fraser and others have called the resulting
crush a “crisis of care,” in which the very fabric of society
is shredded and women are tasked with just barely hold-
ing it together under enormous pressure—including the
demands of work. An unexpected event like an illness or
unplanned pregnancy can become catastrophic, and all of
life is permeated with the need to compete and make no
mistakes, lest one fall into poverty and debt. Everything
that business doesn’t want to pay for through higher taxes,
better wages, or employee benefits has been foisted onto
families, which, in turn, must keep their members healthy
enough to work.
The next financial crisis will present an opportunity
for the left to put the economy back in the service of life.
This means that in our response to the crisis, we must not
fall into the trap of placing “productive” waged work over
unpaid reproductive work. Full employment and a Green
New Deal are important, but it would be a grave mistake
not to put care work at the center of our political project.
What would this look like in practice? For one, it would
require taking basic forms of care off the market and mak-
ing them a shared public responsibility instead. Medicare
for All is already a core demand of the left; we must add toA
s long as we’ve had capitalism, we’ve had
financial crises. Today, mainstream econo-
mists acknowledge that the next crisis will
be resolved not by monetary policy but
through serious spending by the govern-
ment. To ensure that the spending is committed to wealth
redistribution and helps the left build new constituencies,
progressives should consider a feminist analysis: namely,
compensating the reproductive labor that remains largely
invisible and woefully underappreciated in this country.
This labor includes all the work that holds families
and communities together, from child-rearing and elder
care to community politics. Theorist Nancy Fraser de-
scribes it as the “social glue” that allows for social cooper-
ation; without it, there would be “no economy, no polity,
no culture,” she writes. But over the last few decades,
the people who do this work—mostly women—have ab-
sorbed shock after capitalist shock. Care that used to be
social and supported by state investment has been thrown
back on individuals and the family as a private concern.
Consider that federal public investment today stands
at its lowest level since 1947. Advocates for social services
have been losing ground for decades. A comprehensive
child care bill with bipartisan congressional support was
killed back in 1971, after a young Pat Buchanan per-
suaded Richard Nixon that a veto could be used to rally
cultural conservatives. Ronald Reagan fought to reduce
spending on social services so successfully that “in real
terms,” according to John Miller in Dollars & Sense, pro-
grams for low-income Americans “suffered a withering
54 percent cut in federal spending from 1981 to 1988,”
including things like housing subsidies and employment
services. Reagan justified these reductions as an answer to
the crisis of stagflation.
The 1990s saw continued cuts under Bill Clinton,Sarah Leonard
is a contributing
editor at The
Nation and The
Appeal and an
editor at large at
Dissent.“I think
expanding
access to
child care...
is one of
the best
economic
policies you
can put in
place.”
— Kate Bahn,
economist,
Washington Center for
Equitable Growth