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Book Summary

Harrington, Mona. (1999). Care and Equality: Inventing a New Family Politics. New York: Knopf.

  • Part I: Taking Care Seriously
    • Chapter 1: The Care-Equality Problem Enters Politics
    • Chapter 2: A Collapsing Care System
    • Chapter 3: Care as a National Political Value
  • Part II: Embracing the Family
    • Chapter 4: Moral Panic: Sex, Families, Politics
    • Chapter 5: Social Morality and Liberal Family Values
  • Part III: Adding in Equality
    • Chapter 6: Equal Authority: The Motherhood Problem
    • Chapter 7: Equal Authority: The warrior problem
    • Chapter 8: Equal Authority: The problem of private authority
  • Part IV: Opening New Political Challenges
    • Chapter 9: A break in the order
    • Chapter 10: A new politics of conversation

Part I: Taking Care Seriously

Mona Harrington begins her book by discussing how the issue of caregiving entered the national political sphere. Zoë Baird, Clinton ’s nominee for attorney general, was found to have employed an illegal alien as a full time nanny for her child. Harrington describes her as a stressed working mother, “stuck in a tangle of bad choices” (13), a fate which was hers despite her impressively high income. She finds Baird’s story remarkable – not so much for the choices she made, but for the inability of Clinton and others to realize the larger systemic failure of which Baird was a victim. She writes, “We don’t ‘see’ the problem. We don’t see a collapsing care system because we don’t see care as a system to begin with” (25). She argues that until we are able to move beyond our image of care as a private responsibility, women will be unable to achieve equal opportunity. Finally, we will not be able to create a functional system of care unless we are able to view caregiving as a national public concern.

Harrington in part blames our inability to see the need for a system of care on America ’s preoccupation with privacy in family life. From this viewpoint, the public should only ‘invade’ the private realm of the family to provide help when the family itself fails to function properly. This rational, which propels American welfare policy, labels the need for help as a failure on the part of individuals. Harrington argues that the welfare rational is, in actuality, irrational because it is based on the fictitious belief that the normal family can successfully provide care. She states “families…do not have sufficient resources to buy enough of it [care]. Therefore, the system as a whole is undercapitalized, and the unavoidable result, on the whole, is inadequate care” (31). Furthermore, the public institutions built to cope with the family care failure are not equipped to deal with the magnitude of the problem, and function badly as a result. She concludes that we must relinquish the myth that every family can and should have a full-time private caregiver, in order to deal with the problem systematically.

Part II: Embracing the Family

Harrington calls on liberals in particular to adopt care as a national political value. Harrington argues that liberals find care a difficult issue to address because of the historically conservative monopoly on “family values.” Instead, liberals must move beyond the association of caregiving with traditional family values and address the reality of care needs by linking care with economic and equality issues. Liberals must widen the context of their concern, viewing care as a universal need for each individual. By linking together the family, business, and government, a dynamic new system of care can be developed.

A crucial step in building this system is arriving at a new conception of the family and its role in society, again difficult due to the association with conservative views. Harrington argues that some family values are integral to our development as healthy human beings, and as such liberals need to learn to view the family as an important social institution. She argues that the family values linked to caregiving are not tied to the traditional, heterosexual, two-parent family, but should be understood as universal to all types of family relationships. Individual choice and family values are not conflicting, but rather intricately linked. In fact, the family provides a key arena for the development of the individual, by providing privacy, “a needed base for sociability, a place for the practice of an intimate interdependence, an exchange of caregiving and care receiving” (83). A liberal family politics can acknowledge both individual autonomy and interdependency along with the moral values of care and equality (85). In labeling care and equality as moral values, Harrington attempts to shift family politics away from a focus on sexual morality to social morality. In doing so, liberal family politics must address the question of what kind of social support families need to function well.

Part III: Adding in Equality

Society places the burden of child care on women. Creating a more equal society will require redistributing child care costs to employers, taxpayers, and men. Harrington asserts that gender equality can only come about when men and women are able to share authority in leadership roles, taking women away from their families. This conflict is about more than women being pulled in multiple directions; it is also about the cultural norms women are expected to uphold.

Harrington uses Hillary Rodham Clinton to illustrate this point. In the early days of the Clinton administration, Ms. Clinton played an active role as a wife and as a woman interested in social reform. The loss of the democratic majority in Congress in 1994 forced Ms. Clinton to examine her role as First Lady and to make it more suitable for public approval. Although she was visible, she was no longer pushing politically charged issues. Instead she wrote a book on raising children, It Takes a Village, and focused on the issue of global rights for women. According to Harrington, accepting Hillary Clinton as a strong national and political figure would have replaced her role as a caretaker and a mother.

Liberals must begin to evolve the cultural norms about mothering that exclude women from playing an equal role in American society. The goal is to provide a social support system that will allow mothers to be both caregivers and to play an equal role in society, requiring the change of the pervasive moral code in our society: “a good woman is a good mother” (107). Harrington states that this notion of moral must be transformed to “an ethic of care” (114) that distributes the burden of care across society and that recognizes the morality that motherhood has typically represented. Framing the problem in economic terms is most likely to succeed.

Traditionally, authority figures take on the persona of a warrior. Since the warrior image exudes masculinity, women are unable to play this role because the image of a mother and the image of a warrior seem contradictory. Thus, redistributing the burdens of care and creating equal opportunity for women will also require changing notions of authority.

Bill Clinton represented a shift from the traditional warrior figure – he seemed more compromising and open and married a woman who was his professional and intellectual equal. This shift came about due to changes in global politics and the advancement of the women’s movement. It seemed that the Clinton era was the end of the warrior presidency as he consistently championed women’s issues, such as equal rights in the military and attempting to appoint women to decision-making roles (Zoe Baird, Joyce Elders, for example).

Increased attention on women in the military began to change the warrior image. Justice Ginsburg argued that it was impossible to make generalizations about the potential abilities of men and women and that to do so would be to treat both men and women unfairly. The Supreme Court ruling required the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel to accept women into their training programs, which resulted in a forced repositioning of gender roles.

Harrington states that liberals should question the roles of warriors in our society in terms of actual physical threats and within a progressive social agenda. Liberals must be aware of political symbolism and insist on a society that prioritizes care and family, as well as challenge the traditional notions of motherhood that prevent gender equality.

Beyond equal participation in society, women must also achieve the more general objective of equality of opportunity. Equal economic opportunity for women without sacrificing the foundations of family requires society to take on some of the responsibility for family care. Presently, the American economy operates on the basis of private decisions – people can come to work because they independently arrange for their families.

Relying on the private market to produce family care is not acceptable because it supplies opportunity and choice for those who can afford the services. Harrington suggests that liberals move towards creating a new social agenda that focuses on changing ideology. In reality, most women lack choice; many households demand a two person income, and welfare reform has made it impossible for a poor, single woman to choose to stay at home with her child. Choice is also limited on the opposite extreme; women who want to work are forced to quit because there is a lack of adequate family care and social support available. Harrington states that a free market and equality of opportunity are in conflict. Traditionally, liberals have taken up causes that are clearly wrong, such as sexual harassment and exploitation, but have shied away from more subtle and morally complex issues, such as a supportive system of family care. Their agenda must change. True equality must also take biological differences into account. If a woman gets pregnant, has a difficult time, misses a lot of work, and gets fired, she has technically been fired because she has missed work, not because she got pregnant. Not accounting for the pregnancy, however, degrades good family care and equality as social norms.

In sum, the barrier to equality in the workplace for women is not so much due to discrimination but to the lack of social support available for family care. Society must engage in “deliberate political building of a family care system that includes the value of equality” (152). Possibilities for redistributing care include reliance on the private sector, corporate responsibility, taxes, subsidies, extended school days, and after school programs.

Part IV: Opening New Political Channels

Harrington explores possibilities for a new political structure necessary for creating a social support system for family care. Broadly, this new political system must address issues of care and equality which may conflict with traditional notions of motherhood or the warrior political figure. Harrington uses the Clinton presidency as a stepping point to explore the possibilities for a new political system.

A political system that values and prioritizes care and equality cannot have the traditional warrior model. Although Bill Clinton is not the ideal model for new politics, Harrington points out the many ways in which he did not exemplify the warrior – he was married to a woman his political and intellectual equal, good at listening, and considered all sides of an issue. A politics of dialogue and consideration that will allow the creation of a social support system that promotes the values of care and equality: “a democratically inclusive mode of leadership” (174).

Conclusion: A New Politics of Conversation

Harrington discusses the ways in which a participatory politics can be created. The current political system is not working because it cannot account for underlying problems and it alienates specific groups. In order for government to work, it must be closely connected to the people and the problems that people face, such as inequality and an inadequate support system for family care. It is also not enough for one group (i.e., the wealthy and/or educated) to partake in the new political system. Rather, there must exist a dialogue among all of types of Americans (wealthy, educated, poor, white, black, etc.), and from this discussion of problems and shared experience, a salient public policy can emerge.