The following is an excerpt from the author’s book “Feminism Against Progress,” out April 25.
When we tell the story about women entering the workplace only in terms of progress and equality, implicitly we’re saying that all such non-market activity — whether in private domestic life or non-commercial civic associations — is less important.
So, too, are the forms of human association that happen in those settings — all those aspects of artistic, aesthetic, caring, and relational work that are not visible to the market. And this hierarchy dates to the dawn of the Enlightenment.
In “Emile,” a 1762 treatise on education, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau set out his vision for the proper education to form young men into ideal liberal subjects.
Young women, meanwhile, should be raised as charming, compliant support humans: “The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young.”
The job of women was to “delight” men and to birth and care for their babies. In other words, the domain of care is a necessary backdrop to the more important business of full personhood but still just that: a backdrop.
The hierarchy Rousseau set out is alive and well. Traditionally speaking, caring has largely been women’s work, and to a great extent it still is. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that, worldwide, women do between two and 10 times as much unpaid caring
