The gender order of caring in families
While the heterosexual household is a contested family formation, it remains the modal form of family organization. Within all types of families, there is an internal economy within and through which household goods and services are produced: food is prepared and cooked, floors are cleaned, toilets are washed, family events are organized and so forth (Folbre 1994). The relations of production, consumption and the transmission of goods within families operate by different rules of exchange from market production; they are differentiated by age and marital status, and especially by gender, where heterosexual couples are involved (Delphy and Leonard 1992). While there have been changes since the early 1980s, and men now do more childcare and more housework than several decades ago, on average, US data show that wives do 1.7 times the housework of husbands, while married mothers average 1.9 times as much housework as married fathers (Bianchi, Sayer, Milkie and Robinson 2012). Although there are changes in the amount of time men spend in certain areas of childcare when both partners are employed full time, notwithstanding this, a US study spanning the years 2003–7, involving over 13,000 women and men, found mothers’ time in childcare always exceeded fathers’ time, although the gender gap is narrower in dual-earner families (Raley, Bianchi and Wang 2012: 1440).10 The pattern is similar across Europe and nearby countries; while women do much more care work and housework in Greece and Turkey than in Sweden and Norway, the gender disparities remain even within these.11 Even in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Iceland), where there are enhanced childcare supports and extensive paid parental leave for both parents, men remain reluctant to take the full leave available, and where the leave can be shared between mothers and fathers, mothers are far more likely to take it (Cederström 2019). Undertaking hands-on primary caring is not central to men’s identity as men (Hanlon 2012). The gendered male order impacts on men, even in the more gender-egalitarian Nordic states, with men fearing that their managers and co-workers might judge them adversely if they took longer and more optional care leave; they fear they would suffer career penalties (Cederström 2019: 40).
The unequal gender division of both domestic and care labour benefits men individually (Connell 1995: 67–86), as women’s unwaged care and domestic labour frees men up to take public power in an hierarchically ordered economy and society. Men can use their power relative to their class and racial position in ways that involve exercising control over women (Badgett and Folbre 1999; Folbre 2012). The unequal division of care and domestic labour also impoverishes women, especially working-class and poor women, not only in the present but in future time, particularly in old age, due to their lack of economic independence and pension entitlements (Oxfam 2020).
Without recognizing the unique and highly unequal gendered dynamics of household economies, work organizations and the state itself, and the materialist gains that ensue for men of all classes from these, there is misrecognition of the interests of men, qua men, in upholding a capitalist system from which they are net beneficiaries relative to women of their class.
While patriarchy has long historical roots predating capitalism, capitalism has reinforced, legitimated and consolidated a value order in which there is a deep disassociation of value between female-dominated caring labour and market labour. Neoliberal-led globalization has exacerbated that value divide by making the chains of connectedness invisible. It has widened the physical and mental distances between provisioning and consumption, as most are ignorant of the exploitations and abuses that often underpin the food they eat, the clothes they wear or the phones and laptops they use to communicate (Federici 2019: 109–10). The foundational work that is required to care for the Earth, prevent suffering and produce humanity itself in non-exploitative relations is unnamed and unspoken (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 2000; Federici 2019).
Bureaucracy, Hierarchy and the State
While hierarchical divisions are endemic to the organization of capitalism, hierarchical organization is not its prerogative. Bureaucracies are means for organizing power relations, that are constitutionally hierarchical, and for those who exercise control within them, they are ‘a power instrument of the first order’ (Gerth and Wright Mills 1958: 228). Weber goes so far as to say that ‘where the bureaucratization of administration has been completely carried through, a form of power relation is established that is practically unshatterable’. He also claims that bureaucratization is ‘often carried out in direct alliance with capitalist interests’ (Gerth and Wright Mills 1958: 230).
We know from anthropological research that for 99 per cent of their history, humans lived in small foraging groups where there was no organizational capacity and ill-defined leadership roles; they were largely unstratified, fluid in form and non-violent (Schoenhals 2019). There were and are societies that manage their conflicts and differences without violence. One of the features of more peaceful, non-violent societies is that they are generally more gender egalitarian, with women playing key roles in decision-making (Malešević 2010a: 298). It was the emergence of sedentary social organizations, especially the establishment of state power (Carneiro 1970) and related bureaucracies, that has generated both deep gender stratifications and organized warfare (Malešević 2010a: 295–6).
But modern life is lived within the frame of increasingly large bureaucratic organizations, be these public or private services, business corporations, educational institutions and/or non-governmental and community organizations. While there are many polities, entities that have authority over a specific social group or territory or set of institutions that are not states, including organized religions, hegemons and global institutions (Walby 2009), the state remains a powerful polity in determining the outcomes of people’s lives. And in the twenty-first century, it is men who control the means of decision-making and meaning-making within most states (and within all major globalized religions, and most global political and economic institutions).
The subordination of women has been enabled and consolidated by the development of bureaucratized organizational power (Acker 1990, 2006), including the organizational power of the state. While women can and do use the machinery of the state to fight for their rights, it is through the state that women’s subordination is often consolidated in law and regulations, rather than being simply a matter of habit and cultural convention (Walby 2009). The very idea of the ‘social contract’, a cornerstone of democratic thinking, was based on the deeply gendered concept that the civil government replaced the king/father as the protector of the nation (Pateman 1988). This assumes that the protector (the state) is a father figure, an abstract, disinterested player who will always act in the interests of his dependents, who are first defined as women and children. The logic of the state as ‘protector’ enjoins a gendered discourse of care and concern to rationalize power, and oftentimes the abuse of power. The metaphor of the protective father is a political ruse granting legitimacy to the exercise of power and control, though it may be arbitrary and abusive.
There are several ways in which male control of state institutions impact on women as primary carers, both institutionally and ideologically. As bureaucratic entities designed and planned by men, state organizational practices are constitutionally masculine in character. They are governed through gendered concepts of production and reproduction, and gender-configured in terms of recruitment and promotion, the division of labour and systems of control. The state does not always have to operate explicitly in men’s interests to be patriarchal because it is shaped by masculine interests and practices. Multiple dimensions of socially constructed masculinity have historically shaped the multiple modes of power circulating through the domain called the state (Brown 1995: 177). The masculinist character of the state is reflected in the generalized lack of interest in, and commitment to, childcare; in the declining investment post-austerity in many welfare states in basic infrastructural public (care) services; in the adversarial approach of parliamentary debates; and in the timing of political meetings and assemblies, most of which assume that people are not tied to time by care commitments.
Because domain assumptions influence our paradigmatic assumptions (Gouldner 1970) at an ideological level, intersecting identities
