Carefair: Rethinking the Responsibilities and Rights of Citizenship

Elaine Porter is an associate professor of sociology at Laurentian
University.

The ambiguity of the term carefair can be employed here to describe this
book as a comprehensive display of political perspectives on citizens’
responsibilities: neoliberalism, the third way, communitarian, and
social conservatism. With each discussion of the duty discourses from
these perspectives, the author takes the concepts that he later weaves
into his ideas about instituting caregiving that is fair. The term
carefair rests on reworking Stuart White’s idea of fair reciprocity as
an approach to resolving injustice in work-fare requirements. Caregiving
obligations can then be read as analogous to male-based carefare.

Caring fairly requires that caregiving be conceptualized as a domestic
activity but one that is socially valued without reproducing a gender
division of caring labour. All of the duty discourses were found wanting
to resolve this dilemma as long as employment is seen as the only basis
for social inclusion. Where women’s domestic work is recognized, it is
a matter of going beyond its privatization within a patriarchal
household. Current efforts to address societal needs for caregiving are
seen to produce the problems in Margrit Eichler’s individual
responsibility model.

Solutions require factoring in Carol Gilligan’s notion of competing
claims for justice and care in the context of Nancy Fraser’s universal
caregiver model of citizenship. Kershaw’s policy suggestions are aimed
at reworking the incentive structure for male participation in
caregiving because caregiving is considered to be a prime basis for
social inclusion. Arguments for the value of private domestic time come
from Patricia Hill Collins and Dorothy Roberts’s conceptualization of
domestic space as a place crafted for cultural survival by ethnic
minority women. In concert with Gшsta Esping-Andersen, the author sees
child care as central to the welfare state but, in contrast, he aims to
require more male caregiving rather than employing more women. In his
system, time would represent a scarce resource along with money.

There is much of value in this reworking of the caregiving literature,
although it takes only baby steps in basing gender caregiving equity
only on child care. What is not recognized is that less employment time
for men does not necessarily lead to more caregiving.