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“The publication of Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor in 1999 was a significant event in
American moral and political philosophy… Kittay’s book puts issues of disability on
the agenda of moral and political philosophy.”
— Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and
Ethics, University of Chicago

“Twenty years ago Eva Kittay’s book Love’s Labor poignantly and persuasively
argued that modern liberal states, and liberal philosophers, fail to recognize
caregiving as essential human labor that deserves the protection of states, of rights,
and of civil society. Kittay’s book underscores the humanity and universality of care
work, and the need to construct a just world that respects the needs of caregivers
and their dependents worldwide.”
— Robin West, Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and
Philosophy, Georgetown Law

“Few books touch and expand the moral imagination as deeply and humanely as
Love’s Labor. … This remarkable book of many methods opens for all of us new
understandings of equality, social justice, and the practices of care.”
— Bruce Jennings, Senior Advisor, The Hastings Center

“Groundbreaking in its time, Love’s Labor continues to be necessary reading for scho-
lars working at the intersection of feminist theory, moral philosophy, and disability
studies.”
— Rachel Adams, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University
LOVE’S LABOR

This new edition of Eva Feder Kittay’s feminist classic, Love’s Labor, explores how
theories of justice and morality must be reconfigured when intersecting with care
and dependency, and the failure of policy towards women who engage in care
work. The work is hailed as a major contribution to the development of an ethics
of care.
Where society is viewed as an association of equal and autonomous persons, the
work of caring for dependents figures neither in political theory nor in social
policy. While some women have made many gains, equality continues to elude
many others, as in large measure, social institutions fail to take into account the
dependency of childhood, illness, disability and frail old age and fail to adequately
support those who care for dependents. Using a narrative of her experiences caring
for her disabled daughter, Eva Feder Kittay discusses the relevance of her analysis of
dependency to significant cognitive disability. She explores the significance of
dependency work by analyzing John Rawls’ influential liberal theory and two
examples of public policy—welfare reform and family leave—to show how theory
and policy fail women when they fail to understand the centrality of dependency
to issues of justice. This second edition has updated material on care workers, her
adult disabled daughter and key changes in welfare reform.
Using a mix of personal reflection and political argument, this new edition of a
classic text will continue to be an innovative and influential contribution to the
debate on searching for greater equality and justice for women.
Love’s Labor has spoken to audiences around the world and has had an impact on
readers from many countries and in many disciplines: philosophy, sociology, disability
studies, nursing. It has been required and supplementary reading on many under-
graduate courses such as Ethics, Feminist Ethics, Gender and Religious Ethics, Political
Theory, Bioethics and Disability Studies. It has been translated into Italian, Japanese
and Korean.
Eva Feder Kittay is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Stony
Brook University/SUNY. Her pioneering work interjecting questions of care and
disability (especially cognitive disability) into philosophy, and her work in feminist
theory and the philosophy of disability, have garnered a number of honors and
prizes: 2003 Woman Philosopher of the Year by the Society for Women in Phi-
losophy; the inaugural prize of the Institut de Mensch, Ethik und Wissenschaft; the
Lebowitz prize from the American Philosophical Association; and Phi Beta Kappa,
a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Discovery, an NEH Fellow-
ship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Eva Kittay’s first works in philosophy were in the philosophy of language,
publishing Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (1987). Love’s Labor:
Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (1999), received international attention.
The edited collection Women and Moral Theory (with Diana Meyers, 1987) ushered
in decades-long work by philosophers in the ethics of care. Other edited collec-
tions include The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (with Linda Alcoff, 2007)
and The Subject of Care: Theoretical Perspectives on Dependency and Women (with Ellen
Feder, 2003). A 2008 collection—based on a conference she organized, Cognitive
Disability and the Challenge to Moral Philosophy—opened a new field of inquiry
in philosophy. Her most recent book is Learning from My Daughter: The Value and
Care of Disabled Minds (2019).
LOVE’S LABOR
Essays on Women, Equality and
Dependency
Second edition

Eva Feder Kittay

Second edition published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Eva Feder Kittay to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 1999
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-138-08991-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-08992-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-10892-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
CONTENTS

Preface ix

Introduction to the Second Edition 1

Introduction to the First Edition 7

PART I
Love’s Labor: The Requirements of Dependency 27
1 Relationships of Dependency and Equality 29
Reflections on Being a Mother’s Child 29
Dependency in the Human Condition 34

2 Vulnerability and the Moral Nature of Dependency Relations 57

The Transparent Self of the Dependency Worker 58
Moral Obligations of Dependency Workers and an Ethics of Care 60
Moral Obligations to the Dependency Worker 70

PART II
Political Liberalism and Human Dependency
83
Introduction 83
Dependency as a Criterion of Adequacy 83
The Role of Equality and Equality’s Presuppositions 86
The Arguments in Outline 87
viii Contents

3 The Presuppositions of Equality 93

The Circumstances of Justice for a Well-Ordered Society 93
The Idealization That “All Citizens Are Fully Cooperating
Members of Society” 97
Free Persons Are Self-Originating Sources of Valid Claims 102

4 The Benefits and Burdens of Social Cooperation 110

The Two Powers of a Moral Person and the Index of Primary Goods 110
The Public Conception of Social Cooperation 113
Conclusion: The Principles of Justice and Dependency Concerns 118

PART III
Some Mother’s Child
125
Introduction 125
5 Policy and a Public Ethic of Care 127
Welfare De-Form 127
Justifications of Welfare 131
The Family and Medical Leave Act 141
Welfare Re-Formed: A Vision of Welfare Based on Doulia 146
6 “Not My Way, Sesha. Your Way. Slowly.” A Personal Narrative 157
A Child is Born 157
Portrait of Sesha at Twenty-Seven 160
On the Very Possibility of Mothering and the Challenge of the
Severely Disabled Child 161
Mothering Distributed: The Work of Dependency Care 163
Alternative Routes—Routes Not Taken 168
7 Maternal Thinking with a Difference 171
Preservative Love 172
Socialization for Acceptance 174
Fostering Development 177
Care for Disability and Social Justice 180
Lessons for the Theoretician 185

Afterword 192
References 199
Index 211
PREFACE

Eldora Mitchell is nearly as old as the century, and for her it has been a life of love and
service. Starting at the age of 12, when she went to work scrubbing white people’s
floors to help her family. Later, she cleaned hospital rooms to feed her own children
and cared for her grandchildren while their parents were working. In her 60s, she
nursed her dying husband and her elderly mother.
Now, at 95, frail and slowly going blind, it is Mrs. Mitchell’s turn. … Mrs.
Mitchell has about $8,000 in savings and no longterm health insurance. What she
does have is her family and her expectation—that they will do for her as she has
done for the previous generations …

So begins an article that appeared on the front page of the New York Times (Rimer
1998, 1) just as I first completed the first edition of the book you have before you.
The same article ends with the story of Martha Perry, forty-nine, who gave up her
job and daily life with her husband to care for her mother-in-law. After the death of
her mother-in-law, she served as a round-the-clock caregiver for six months for her
ailing eighty-five-year-old mother before finally returning to her husband and her
job. What is Martha Perry’s job when she is not taking care of family? She is the
manager of a group home for disabled adults.
Both the older Eldora Mitchell and the younger Martha Perry have spent their
lives doing what I call dependency work, the work of caring for those who are inevi-
tably dependent. The dependency work on which the reporter focuses is familial and
largely unpaid1—the paid work these women did was either domestic labor (itself
not dependency work in the sense discussed here, but closely aligned with it) or
dependency work proper, such as managing the group home for disabled adults.
The strength and strains of a life of dependency work are captured in these
stories, as are the involved histories of race and sex in dependency care. The Times
article is at once a paean to the strength of African-American family life—to the
network of help the extended family in African-American communities provides—
x Preface

and a shameful testament to poor health conditions, economic strains, and a war-
ranted history of mistrust of institutional arrangements that are the legacy and
products of racism. Although the African-American community is featured in this
story, the article cites a remarkable figure: one in four American families is caring
for an elderly relative or friend “doing everything from changing diapers to shop-
ping for groceries.”2 This one-in-four figure does not include the work of caring
for other dependents such as young children, the ill, and the disabled. In these
families, no less than in the families featured in the story, the dependency worker is
likely to be a woman. The fact that women largely bear the burden of dependency
work is a legacy of tradition, of sexism, and of a sexual taboo against men being
involved in the intimate care of women’s bodies.3
In the stories of Eldora Mitchell, Martha Perry, and the other women (and some
men) featured in the Times article lie the point and purpose of my book. I began this
project in response to an invitation to speak on the topic of “Elusive Equality” as the
keynote speaker of the Helen Lynd Colloquium Series at Sarah Lawrence College.
Since philosophers and feminists alike had written volumes on the topic of equality, it
was not clear to me what I could add to the topic. As I began to explore the bur-
geoning literature by feminist scholars, especially legal theorists, questioning the ideal
of equality, I began to see that there was a consideration missing from many of the
accounts. I began to see that while equality often entailed women crossing the sexual
divide between women’s work and men’s work, equality rarely meant that men
crossed over the divide to the women’s side: our side—women’s—the side where
work was largely, though not exclusively, unpaid or poorly paid care of dependents.
Simone de Beauvoir has written that “woman has always been man’s dependent, if not
his slave,” that “the two sexes had never shared the world in equality” (Beauvoir 1952,
xx). But it seemed now that this dependency was a derivative dependency, derivative
of the care of dependents. This view was one that I had already encountered, if not in
a fully articulated form, in the work of Susan Okin. Okin (1979) detailed how the
great political philosophers of the Western tradition envisioned a role for women in
political life only when they reconceived the role of women in the family—suggesting
thereby the intimate relation between women’s situation as caregivers and their
exclusion from the public domain. It seemed to me that one could delineate a critique
of the ideal of equality that I call the dependency critique.
The dependency critique is a feminist critique of equality that asserts: A
conception of society viewed as an association of equals masks inevitable
dependencies, those of infancy and childhood, old age, illness and disability.
While we are dependent, we are not well-positioned to enter a competition for
the goods of social cooperation on equal terms. And those who care for depen-
dents, who must put their own interests aside to care for one who is entirely
vulnerable to their actions, enter the competition for social goods with a handicap.
Viewed from the perspective of the dependency critique, we can say: Of course,
women have not achieved equality on men’s side of the sexual divide—for how
could women abandon those they leave behind on their side of that divide? Their
children, their elderly parents, their ill spouse or friend?
 Preface xi

Yes, equality has been elusive for women and will continue to be so unless and
until better institutional supports are put in place to enable women who wish to
leave the exclusive domain of home—the haven for dependencies that no political
theory could abolish by proclaiming all men [sic] to be equal—without jeopardiz-
ing the well-being of those they love.
Focusing on dependency, however, also allows one to see that as some women
leave behind many traditional roles, other women fill those roles. The process
creates greater differentiation among women. This indicates that while dependency
and dependency work offer an important connection between women, they also
give rise to a rift between those who do dependency work and those who have
found other means to fulfill traditional responsibilities. The source of division is still
more disturbing as women raising children on their own increasingly swell the
ranks of the poor and suffer from the stigma attached to solo motherhood (even as
its incidence increases), just as the condition of other more privileged women
improves. To what extent, I wondered, are the “welfare wars” over the fate of
poor solo mothers—a war now lost to welfare “reform”—a reflection of an ideal of
equality for women that does not seriously consider the role of dependency and
dependency care in women’s lives?
These reflections on dependency were, I realized, prompted in part by a perso-
nal situation that made questions of dependency especially salient for me. My
daughter is a lovely young woman who is profoundly dependent and will always
be. Her conditions of significant cognitive disability and cerebral palsy have meant
she can never carry on a life without constant assistance. I have lived with my
daughter’s dependency for twenty-eight years and have had a long time to absorb
the meaning and extent of dependency.
Out of these considerations grew the idea for this book.
My original hope was to formulate a new theory of equality that embraces
dependency, for I failed to see how any progressive movement, at this historical
juncture, could do without an egalitarian ideal. If there was something amiss with
the ideal, it was in its formulation—not in the concept of equality itself. To pro-
vide such a theory was not possible in this book. There was too much work to be
done in simply clearing the ground for an idea as radical as an equality that
embraced dependency rather than defining itself against dependency. So, this book
is but a propaedeutic to some future theory of equality.
This book is as eclectic and yet as knit together as the concerns that gave it birth.
Some of the material is very theoretical, some is more empirical, and some is
deeply personal. Many of the chapters were originally written as separate articles
and have been revised for this book in order to have them read as a single work.
My hope is that the reader will be willing to make the voyage with me, through
my different voices and through my different but related concerns. I recognize,
nonetheless, that some readers will pick and choose, and so I have been careful to
include cross-references that will direct these readers to ideas that are key points for
the chapters they want to explore.
xii Preface

In these prefatory remarks I would like to offer a few cautionary notes that will,
I hope, forestall criticisms that may keep a reader from fully grasping my intent.
First, a question I frequently encounter: Why focus only on the more extreme
dependencies? Dependency is found not only in the case of a young child who is
dependent on a mothering person. A boss is dependent on his or her secretary.
Urban populations are dependent on agricultural communities. Persons on farms
are dependent on electrical workers. Professors are dependent on janitors, and
janitors are dependent on engineers. And so on. We are all interdependent.
My point is that this interdependence begins with dependence. It begins with the
dependency of an infant, and often ends with the dependency of a very ill or frail
person close to dying. The infant may develop into a person who can reciprocate
care, an individual upon whom another can be dependent and whose continuing
needs make her interdependent with others. The frail elderly person, like Eldora
Mitchell, may herself have been involved in a series of interdependent relations. But
at some point, there is a dependency that is not yet or no longer an inter-
dependency. By excluding this dependency from social and political concerns, we
have been able to fashion the pretense that we are independent—that the cooperation
between persons that some insist is interdependence is simply the mutual (often
voluntary) cooperation between essentially independent persons. The argument of
this book is that our mutual dependence cannot be bracketed without excluding
both significant parts of our lives and large portions of the population from the
domain of equality. To this end, I explore the implications for political and social life
of the most fundamental dependency—not only for the dependent, but also for
those who care for the dependent. As we draw out the implications of dependency
for social and political life, we come to a new appreciation of our interdependence—
because no one escapes dependency in a lifetime, and many must care for depen-
dents in the course of a life. Rather than denying our interdependence, my aim is to
find a knife sharp enough to cut through the fiction of our independence.
A related point derives from the seeming one-sidedness of the dependency I
portray and the lack of reciprocation of care I presume on the part of the depen-
dent in the relation. I begin with the case of a dependent who is unable to reci-
procate care, not because I assume it to be the most typical case, but because it is
the case most in need of consideration if one is asking about the social responsi-
bility to the caregiver. That social responsibility diminishes as the dependent is
more and more capable of reciprocating and as the dependent is less than totally
helpless. The less helpless and more capable the dependent, the closer the rela-
tionship begins to approximate relations between equals.
But for us to consider demands of dependency, we have to look at the whole
range of possibilities—especially the portion that most diverges from relations among
equals. This strategy then begins with the assumption of our dependence, asks what
is required for the more demanding cases, and then presumes that we modify those
demands as we think about relationships in which the persons are able to respond
with reciprocity. The alternative strategy, the one which I believe has failed us,
begins with the assumption of equality and then tries to make adjustments for the
 Preface xiii

non-normal condition of dependency. If we try to accommodate the most needy, we

have a better chance of capturing the requirements of justice for all. This is an insight
captured in John Rawls’s “difference principle,” but one which, I will argue, is too
narrowly applied within his own theory of justice.
Another cautionary note concerns the gendered nature of the discussion con-
cerning dependency work, mothering and caring. Care of dependents is not
inevitably nor exclusively the province of women. But it is mostly women who are
dependency workers. Care of children and the raising of children is not exclusively
the work of mothers. I have witnessed, firsthand, how competent a father can be in
the daily, hands-on care of a dependent child, and I am convinced there is nothing
inherently gendered about the work of care. Nonetheless, to ignore the fact that
most of the care of children is done by mothers, and to call this work of caring for
children parenting rather than mothering, is a distortion that serves women poorly.
I therefore follow other feminists who have called the care of a child mothering,
acknowledging that fathers, too, can be excellent “mothers.”
This said with respect to the clearly gendered terms “mother” and “mothering,” and
since women primarily care for all dependents, I must comment on my reliance on a
non-gendered term, “dependency worker,” to speak of those who care for dependents.
Resorting to a non-gendered term is meant to reflect a vision inherent in my notion of
dependency work. Namely, that while this labor is now largely gendered, it need not
be. This book is, in part, about a more equitable distribution of dependency work. The
work of caring for dependents must be, as all work should be, distributed not by gender,
race, disability or class but by skill and inclination. The non-gendered nature of my
terminology is meant to be consistent with that vision.
The reader will also notice that I have chosen to use the female pronouns for
dependency workers. As there are no English gender-neutral pronouns, I also employ
the female pronouns for dependents. This use, then, should be seen as a convention—
one intended to counter the conventional use of the masculine as the generic pronoun.
A book on dependency must above all acknowledge the author’s own depen-
dence on all the persons involved in making such a book possible. There are so
many to thank and there are so many different sorts of things for which to thank.
First, I must express my abiding gratitude to Margaret Grennan (Peggy) and the
many dedicated caring dependency workers who have helped attend to my
daughter over these many years. Their devotion, their attention and responsiveness
have taught me much of what I have tried to communicate in this volume. My
debt to Peggy, in particular, whom I write about in the last part of the book and
who helped to care for Sesha for over 25 years, is immeasurable. Peggy remained a
friend to Sesha and to our family until her death in 2019. What I learned from her
is expressed in all my writings on the subject of care.
Today, Sesha receives wonderful care from staff at the Center for Discovery in
Harris, New York, and while Sesha lived at home with us in the original writing
of this work, their assistance in caring for Sesha both at the Center and at home
with us enabled me to continue to reflect and write about the matters covered in
this volume.
xiv Preface

I want to express my gratitude to the late Elfie Raymond for the initial invita-
tion to speak on equality (the impetus for this book), for reading drafts of several
chapters, for helping me come up with useful terminology to express some of my
ideas, and for the many ways in which she has taught and inspired me since I first
was her student as a college sophomore.
A number of persons have read most of these chapters, albeit in an earlier form.
Diana Meyers has offered her sage advice on most of the chapters, as they have
appeared in various versions and stages of development. I have benefited from
our many talks on these and related topics and am grateful for our long friendship
in which a commitment to women’s moral voices has been paramount. Ellen
Feder—whom I am proud to count both as a former student and as a current
friend and colleague—helped me determine that the collection of essays, in fact,
constituted a book.
Other colleagues have read portions of the book. Robert E. Goodin has not
only inspired my thoughts on an ethics of care based on vulnerability, he has been
kind enough to read and comment on several versions of Chapters One to Four.
Many thanks to John Baker for his interest in my approach to equality and for
reading and commenting on earlier drafts of many chapters of the book. Chapters
Three and Four, published in a slightly different form as “Human Dependency and
Rawlsian Equality” (Chapter Ten of Feminists Rethink the Self, edited by Diana T.
Meyers [Colorado: Westview Press, 1996, 219–266]), have also been read and
commented on by several colleagues, including Susan Okin, Annette Baier, Susan
Brison, William Kymlicka, George Sher, Anthony Weston, Jonathan Adler,
Michael Simon, Kenneth Baynes, Alistair MacLoed, Leigh Cauman, and Neil
Tennant—as well as a number of anonymous reviewers. I have benefited from
their comments even if the current version does not reflect all their astute advice.
Chapter Five is drawn from two sets of papers. The first set is on the federal
Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and the second on the welfare reform
debates that culminated in the 1994 welfare reform bill, The Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families (TANF) Block Grant. “Taking Dependency Seriously: The
Family and Medical Leave Act Considered in Light of the Social Organization of
Dependency Work” (Hypatia, 10 [1] [1995], reprinted in Feminist Ethics and Social
Policy, edited by Patrice Di Quinzio and Iris Marion Young, [Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1998, 1–22]), benefited from the helpful comments of Iris
Marion Young, Patrice de Quinzio, Lisa Conradi, and Amy Baehr. Discussions with
Iris Young were crucial for guiding me in the direction of considering welfare as an
application of my theoretical work. The earliest paper on welfare policy, “Women,
Welfare, and a Public Ethic of Care,” (Annual Proceedings for Philosophical Exchange,
27, 1996–1997) was presented for the Philosophical Exchange at SUNY-Brockport.
I thank Joseph Gilbert for the invitation and comments. An amplification and further
development of this paper, “Welfare, Dependency and a Public Ethic of Care”
(Social Justice (25 [1] [1998]), benefited from the knowledgeable and thoughtful sug-
gestions and editorial guidance of Gwendolyn Mink. I also want to thank Nancy
Hirschmann, Martha Fineman and Joan Tronto for their comments. The material in
 Preface xv

Chapter Five is importantly inspired by the women on welfare whom I have known
and worked with, especially Kelly Telgalo and Terry Scofield, and by the marvelous
women on the Women’s Committee of One Hundred: Guida West, Gwendolyn
Mink, Ruth Brandwein, Sonya Michel, Eileen Boris, Kim Christensen, Deirdre
English, Heidi Hartmann, Pat Reuss, Frances Fox Piven, Diana Pearce, Cynthia
Harrison, Mimi Abramovitz, Linda Gordon, Felicia Nestor, and many others. I
learned an enormous amount from their knowledge and dedication to women and
welfare.
Chapters Six and Seven are revisions and amplifications of “Not My Way, Sesha.
Your Way. Slowly” which appears as “Not My Way, Sesha, Your Way, Slowly:
‘Maternal Thinking’ in the Raising of a Child with Profound Intellectual Dis-
abilities” (On Behalf of Mothers: Legal Theorists, Philosophers, and Theologians
Reflect on Dilemmas of Parenting, edited by Julia Hanisberg and Sara Ruddick
[New York: Beacon Press]). Sara Ruddick’s brilliant editing was essential as I
turned these deeply personal thoughts into a publishable paper. I am deeply
grateful to her for reading other chapters in various stages of development and for
her support throughout this project.
Westview Press, Indiana Press, and Beacon Press, as well as Hypatia and Social
Justice have been very accommodating in permitting the use of part or all of pre-
viously published material.
A number of outstanding former graduate students have helped with various
stages of this process. Emily Lee helped sort out various drafts of early material in
preparation for assembling and revising them for the book. Sarah Miller’s efforts,
with those of Jenny Hansen, were invaluable as they collected references, checked
quotations, and gathered vital empirical data. Earlier in the process I had the
research assistance of Barbara Andrew, Barbara LeClerc, and Eric Steinhart. I thank
them each for their assiduous efforts. Important, as well, has been the input of
some of the students and others in my graduate seminars on feminist theory—
especially the seminar of 1991, affectionately called Femsem.
The Department of Philosophy was kind enough to allow me leave time and to
put the resources of the department at my disposal. I am indebted to my Chair,
Edward Casey, for his willingness to offer the support of the department through-
out the many years I have been engaged in this project. A special thank you to
Virginia Massaro, Letitia Dunn, and Martha Smith for their services and support.
Anne Gallette provided secretarial help that kept my office at home functioning
well enough for me to write.
Portions of this book were written in a beautiful and peaceful house in Maine,
made available by the generosity of my dear friend, Donald Sussman.
I wish to recognize those persons in my life who have been at the center of my
thoughts on the labors of love. First, my mother—my earliest and best teacher of love’s
labors. Next my two children, Leo and Sesha, who never cease to reward me for my
own labors of love. And finally, my life partner, Jeffrey, who has shared with me the
care of our children, the writing of this book, and a life of mutual love, respect, and
xvi Preface

concern. Thank you, Jeffrey, for reading and thinking about this book and for providing
the inspiration and hope that men and women can one day share the world in equality.

Notes
1 Mrs. Perry’s husband and his brothers paid her $200 a week to care for their mother.
2 I was unable to find data that was entirely comparable. But that which is available sug-
gests that the situation, at least in the overall population, is somewhat different today in so
far as the figure that tended to be cited was one in six in 2015 with no more current
figures cited (Weber-Raley and Smith. 2015, 15). Nonetheless this remains a substantial
figure. And it continues to be the case that while men do participate, the overwhelming
majority of caregivers are women.
3 The article makes it clear that men, as well as women, engaged in familial dependency
work. It speaks about the son of Eldora Mitchell who does the primary dependency work
for his mother. Female relatives and friends help with some intimate care for her. How-
ever, in the case of Martha Perry, her husband felt that because he could not bathe his
mother or do the more intimate care, it was best for his wife to do this work.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND
EDITION

It has been twenty years since the publication of Love’s Labor. Its reception has
surprised and delighted me. It is such an idiosyncratic work: essentially a philoso-
phical treatise, it deals with issues usually tackled by the more empirical fields.
While most of the text is scholarly in voice, it ends with a narrative written in the
first person—a deeply personal tale of my voyage in life with a beloved person
who is disabled. Could philosophers accept it as philosophy? Would those outside
of philosophy be willing to wade through the arguments I so painstakingly crafted?
Love’s Labor has slowly come to be read far and wide, and as I have lectured
throughout the world, I have learned that it has found audiences in places as
diverse and far-flung as Malta, Chile, Kyoto, Seoul, and a small village in Zim-
babwe, as well as the various corners of Europe and North America. Different
audiences have been interested in the feminist concerns raised, the discussion of
intellectual disability, the theoretical questions concerning justice and equality, and
the practical questions for a welfare state. The interests of the many readers have
mirrored the array of concerns I attempt to cover here.
It has found audiences both within and notably outside of philosophy. Most
heartening for me has been the reception of people who have care responsibilities
for dependent others. It has been especially rewarding to learn that what I say
about the care of a severely cognitively disabled daughter has resonances for people
dealing with the care of people with very different sorts of disabilities, chronic ill-
ness, and deep forgetfulness. Although I have learned so much from the work of
other disability scholars, I challenge some of the verities that come out of that
work. Some in the disability community have taken on these challenges, and there
is a softening of some of the positions I found to be too dogmatic or not easily
applicable to those with significant cognitive disabilities. In the meantime, I have
also come to see new ways to understand the remarkable work of disability scholars
as applicable in the case of people with disabilities similar to those of my daughter.
2 Introduction to the Second Edition

One of the most frequent questions I have been asked is: “Why love’s labor?”
The question comes up so frequently, I believe, not merely because I do not
attempt to answer the question in the book, but also because the book is more
fixed on the social arrangements of care and less on its emotional aspect. The
question is a good one because love is neither necessary nor sufficient for well-
done dependency work; it is neither necessary nor sufficient for care. Perhaps it is
these very efforts to untangle the strands of love and care which prompt people to
ask me why I entitled the book “Love’s Labor.”
The flippant answer is that it is a title that rolls off the tongue and echoes the
work of the greatest writer in English. But the better answer is that care is so often
referred to as love’s labor. I suspect that is because when love realizes itself in labor,
that labor is the care of someone we love. It is such love-driven labor which, when
combined with all the other elements that makes our enterprise of care successful,
provides a standard for the care we ourselves generally wish to receive. “She cared
for me like a mother,” for example, is meant to convey that the care I received is
worthy of the care a mother provides to the child she loves. This is not to say that
the mother’s love will always provide the best care, though the chances are that
care will be better than that of an otherwise proficient caregiver not motivated by
love. Although care motivated by love is an ideal that is upheld, love and care are
paradoxically (and sometimes tragically) not always compatible. “She cared for me
like a daughter,” says the elderly woman of a cherished caregiver—though chances
are pretty good that her own loving daughter might have done a much poorer job
of it, even though we like to think the daughter would have done a better job given
her love for her mother. The affect of love, and its history in a relationship, can be too
thick, too laden with conflict and tensions that are almost inescapable in deep and
close relationships. But it is the idealized (in the best sense of the term) version of
such love that figures in the term “love’s labor.”
Furthermore the expression evokes the affective and relational character of the
most important and successful dependency relations. These speak to the motiva-
tional force one tries to harness when one is caring—when one is setting aside
one’s own needs and wishes in order to understand and be responsive to what the
other cares about. Such an effort transforms us into what I have called in the book
a “transparent self.” As such, the term “love’s labor” is evocative of the cost to the
self—a cost that love may well discount—when one turns one’s attention to
another’s interests, even foregoing our own interest. Love may perhaps discount
the cost, but dependency workers shouldn’t have to bear it alone, and society
should not expect that of them. And yet it continues to do so and to be a key to
the elusiveness of equality for women. Hence the book’s subtitle: “Essays on
Women, Equality and Dependency.”
Another significant question, first raised by a well-known disability scholar and
echoed in audiences in a variety of forums, pertains to the subtitle. The critic
pointed out that the book, in addressing dependency, speaks extensively about the
dependency worker (as I call those who care for people who are dependent on the
care of another to meet their most basic needs) but except in the narrative portion,
 Introduction to the Second Edition 3

it has little to say about the people whom they care for and about. It is true that
this book is more about those who do the labor of love and less about those who
require that labor to survive and thrive. I had in fact not theorized those whom I
call “the charge” to the same extent that I theorized the dependency worker. It is a
one-sidedness I have tried to rectify in subsequent essays and books. But though I
consider the relationship critical in Love’s Labor, I focus on only one relata. Why?
The reason relates to the original point of the inquiry. I began the project asking
the question: Why have women had such a difficult time getting a foothold in the
spheres previously occupied by men when so many legal barriers had been lifted?
That is, why do women remain poorly represented in the spheres of power and
influence? Why do they continue to have earnings substantially below men, even
when they engage in the same work? In short, why has equality proved so elusive
for women? My focus in Love’s Labor therefore was on the struggles of the women
who are expected to handle most of the dependency concerns both within and
outside the family. Sadly, although the situation of some women has improved, not
that much has changed in women’s earnings or the gendered distribution in work.
One could write Love’s Labor today with very few modifications, and in this second
edition I have tried to document this by finding comparable data to that which I
included originally.
The thesis I presented was that women’s engagement with dependency work
was central to these inequities. Twenty years later, the statistics in the United
States, at least, are clear. Women who are unencumbered by caregiving responsi-
bilities, or who are childless, have edged closer to parity with men in wages and
salaries. Not so for women with children, despite the higher levels of work parti-
cipation and education which women as a group have attained. In 2017, an article
reporting on new studies of pay differential in the U.S. stated that the wages of
men and women begin to diverge most precipitously as they reached their late
twenties to mid-thirties, that is “when many women have children. Unmarried
women without children continue to earn closer to what men do.” The article
continues: “The big reason that having children, and even marrying in the first
place, hurts women’s pay relative to men’s is that the division of labor at home is
still unequal, even when both spouses work full time.” (Miller 2017) We are hardly
any closer today than we were in 1999 to realizing gender equality on these fronts.
Still, some progress may be glimpsed. American feminists have taken depen-
dency concerns on board to a greater extent than they had at the time of the
publication of the first edition. There are a number of advocacy groups that focus
on promoting policies that will help caregivers. There are also more calls for paid
family leave, as well as the ever-present insistence on pay equity. Paid family leave
has been initiated in about six states to date, and at least one major Presidential
hopeful is making it a prominent campaign pledge for 2020. Playgrounds in urban
areas can be seen to sport men with strollers or pushing children on swings—and in
a “progressive” enclave such as the Upper West Side in New York City hardly a
woman can be seen in the playground at such times. But unfortunately, these
hopeful signs have, as yet, had little major impact.
4 Introduction to the Second Edition

The feminist agenda (if one can still speak in these terms) has been transfixed by
the urgency of the #MeToo movement—almost to the exclusion of other vital
issues. Although eliminating sexual predation and violence against women is crucial
to the aspiration for a more just and equal world as any, we should be able to fight
against sexual harassment and assault and simultaneously fight for a world in which
the concerns of dependents and caregivers figure as central to justice and equality.
As I argued (or more correctly adumbrated) in the original edition, dependency
concerns touch on virtually all social justice issues. The erasure of dependency from
public life is reflected in and exasperates racial inequality as well as sexist inequality.
It figures in the discriminatory conditions disabled people face. What we under-
stand to be recognized and legitimate dependency relations affect the lives of
LGBTQ people trying to establish families and take care of their beloved partners
when they fall ill. Sexual harassment and domestic violence get a foothold in a
sexist society where women have to rely on the good graces of men to feed and
care for their children. The resource priorities we give to militarism, the unbridled
hoarding of wealth to the detriment of taking care of those who need care—these
and so many more issues intersect with injustices that arise from a failure to
recognize dependency concerns as public concerns.
So it continues to be the case that in the U.S. and around the world women
who have dependency responsibilities are poorer and have continued to find
equality elusive. For all women’s gains, societies in most parts of the world—but
markedly in the wealthiest of nations—the United States, have not come to grips
with the demands of dependency. We will need to reject the view that depen-
dency, when it is inevitable and not merely the consequence of unjust structures, is
an abject state to be shunned. Until we accept and even embrace this dependency
as the source of our deepest attachments and the kernel of all human social orga-
nization, we will not find our way to a fully just and caring society in which
gender equality is realized. This is an argument that still needs making and which I
continue to make.
Since writing Love’s Labor I have also come to see that dependency concerns
force us to move away from conceptions of justice that are confined to the nation-
state. I have come to see, through studying the role that immigrant and migrant
labor plays in dependency work, that a conception of justice that is limited to the
institutions of the state is incoherent in our globalized world. The demographics of
aging, the entry of women into the workplace in massive numbers, and the dis-
placements caused by contemporary forms of globalized advanced capitalism result
in migrants and immigrants (who do not enjoy the privileges and protections of
citizenship) doing much of the dependency work in wealthy industrialized states.
Even a state in which a public feminist ethic of care predominates would have
difficulty incorporating these crucial workers within a purely domestic, state-bound
conception of justice.
If we are to work toward a world in which the achievements of some women
do not dependent on exploiting the dependency work of other women (while
leaving their own families with a care deficit) we must think about care and justice
 Introduction to the Second Edition 5

in a global context. This is not something that is discussed at all in Love’s Labor and
it is, to my mind, a deficiency of this work. Yet the emphasis on dependency in
this volume contains the seeds for the reorientation that is needed. And I have
begun to take up the challenge in a number of articles about the fate of migrant
care workers. In this I have followed and been joined by other feminists who have
done excellent work in exposing the problematic ways wealthier countries and rich
sectors of developing countries meet the increasing demand for care workers by
exploiting the poverty of women in other parts of the world.
The fact that in the past twenty years so little has changed and my own views have
not been altered much accounts for the fact that little of the substance of the book has
been altered. I have attempted to update the statistics wherever I could locate com-
parable figures. I have also updated the language used to speak of intellectual or cog-
nitive disabilities. The original text used the “R” word which is so despised by people
with intellectual disabilities—despised because it has become a term of disparagement.
When the book was first penned, and in the spirit in which I used it, it was a diag-
nostic term indicating those whose intellectual quotient (IQ) was below the statistical
norm of 100. I no longer use the term not only because of the nastiness that now
attaches to it, but also because I have grown deeply suspicious of the criteria behind
such a diagnostic term. This is not because I resist the belief that there are disturbances
and variations in the many different capacities by which we cognize, but because I
disbelieve in a singular measure of intelligence. My life with my daughter and the
many disabled people I have come to know convinces me that intelligence and cog-
nition is a widely varied phenomenon—one may be disabled in some aspects but
capable in others. The appropriate treatment, training and care of people with these
sorts of disabilities is to discover what the abilities are, what the disabling conditions
(internal and external) may be, and how to maximize the possibilities for a rich life.
This last point brings me back to the question I mentioned at the start of this new
introduction, that while I speak often of the dependency relation I focus on only one of
the relata. What about the dependent? The dependent who plays an especially large role
in the development of Love’s Labor is my daughter Sesha, who as an adult remains as
fully dependent as she was while an infant. Sesha is now a woman of forty-nine. When
I began the essays that constitute Love’s Labor Sesha was in her twenties. She still lived at
home with us, and I was intimately involved in her care, although I did have the help
not only of my spouse, but also of fulltime professional caregivers. The main caregiver,
Peggy, about whom I write in the narrative at the end of the book, retired after caring
for Sesha for over twenty-five years, and sadly is no longer alive. While she was well she
continued to visit Sesha several times a year at Sesha’s new home, and when no longer
able to visit had facetime sessions where the two laughed as Peggy sang old familiar silly
songs to Sesha. They both truly enjoyed the friendship that continued until the day
Peggy died. Sesha now lives in a wonderful community dedicated to providing full and
rich lives to people with multiple disabilities. She still spends the weekends with her
parents—and now, as we both age, we are even more dependent on assistance in caring
for her. And, as I like to say, “Sesha finds her people,” and has loving, talented, and
skillful caregivers who help on the home visits.
6 Introduction to the Second Edition

In the years since I published Love’s Labor I have written many essays and a book
about the value, dignity and personhood of people who have severe cognitive
disabilities. I have come, increasingly, to see Sesha as an adult, as her own person
even as she remains entirely dependent, and have come to more fully recognize
how deeply dependent I am on her. I have also come to believe that she should
have far better political representation than is currently available. In the intervening
years, my son has married and become a father of three sons. So, my daughter is
now an aunt. Her life is very much enhanced with the expansion of our family.
Watching her interact with her nephews and watching each of them react to her in
different ways is fodder for more thought about our inherent empathetic abilities
and about the meaningfulness of children in the lives of adults with cognitive dis-
abilities. As she has matured and her life has developed, Sesha has continued to
teach me about my own limited understanding of her life and her capabilities. And
she continues to inspire my life and my work.
With this new edition I hope to learn whether it retains its relevance in the future
decades of the twenty-first century and in the global context that must shape all future
research. I look forward to this next phase of my journey through the twists and turns
of a life lived with the recognition of inevitable human dependence.
Eva Feder Kittay
April 24, 2010, White Lake, NY
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST
EDITION

Dependents require care. Neither the utterly helpless newborn who must be cared
for in all aspects of her life nor a frail, but functioning, elderly person who needs
only assistance to carry on with her life, will survive or thrive without another who
meets her basic needs. Dependency can be extensive or brief, with the extended
dependency of early childhood or a temporarily incapacitating illness. Dependen-
cies may be alleviated or aggravated by cultural practices and prejudices, but given
the immutable facts of human development, disease, and decline, no culture that
endures beyond one generation can be secure against the claims of human depen-
dency. Questions of who takes on the responsibility of care, who does the hands-
on care, who sees to it that the caring is done and done well, and who provides the
support for the relationship of care and for both parties to the caring relationship—
these are social and political questions. They are questions of social responsibility
and political will. How these questions are answered will determine whether the
facts of human dependency can be made compatible with the full equality of all
citizens—that is, whether full citizenship can be extended to all.
How a social order organizes care of these needs is a matter of social justice.
Traditionally women have been those attending to dependencies. The labor has
been seen as part of familial obligations, obligations that trump all other respon-
sibilities. Women who have been sufficiently wealthy or of sufficiently high status
have sometimes been presented with an option to confer the daily labor of
dependency care to others—generally other, mostly poor and ill-situated,
women. Poor women who have had dependency responsibilities along with paid
employment have often relied on female familial help. The gendered and priva-
tized nature of dependency work has meant, first, that men have rarely shared
these responsibilities—at least with the women of their own class; and, second,
that the equitable distribution of dependency work, both among genders and
among classes, has rarely been considered in the discussions of political and social
8 Introduction to the First Edition

justice that take as their starting point the public lives of men. This starting point
has determined not only moral, social, and political theory; it also has determined
the shape of public policy.

Elusive Equality
When I do not see plurality stressed in the very structure of a theory, I know that I
will have to do lots of acrobatics … to have this theory speak to me without
allowing the theory to distort me in my complexity. (Lugones 1991, 43)

Within the course of Western political and legal theory, claims made on behalf of a
universal conception of humanity have had a progressive thrust. From her own posi-
tion of difference, Lugones challenges us to construct theory that addresses those who
see not the face of a liberator but the visage of an oppressor in the image of a universal
humanity. The questioning of inborn privileges and hierarchies is our inheritance from
the egalitarian traditions that frame the legal and political doctrines prevalent in
modern democratic institutions. But increasingly, social movements reveal the exclu-
sionary aspects of the universal doctrines, so much so that the challenge posed to
feminists by Lugones cannot go unheeded. Group identities are an unwelcome
intrusion of difference into the ideal of equality. Partiality and perspective threaten to
tear the benevolent blindfold off the figure of justice.
No one who pursues these concerns desires to undermine hard-won assumptions
of moral and political parity. Still, some insist that the liberal ideals of impartiality,
neutrality, and equality itself cannot bring about the egalitarian vision they are meant
to foster. These ideals seem especially resistant to efforts to put plurality into the very
structure of our theories. Many contemporary voices have insisted that equality will
be formal, or even empty, until perspective and difference are acknowledged and
incorporated within the fabric of political theory and practice.
Equality has served some daughters of the Enlightenment very well. It steered a
movement that has culminated in the affirmation of women’s right to enfranch-
isement in all Western nations. In the United States, after thirty years of equal
rights legislation for women, its mandate covers everything from sports to educa-
tion to the participation of women in the armed forces. Women in the United
States have made progress under its banner.1 Women occupy positions from
astronaut to CEO and are now nearly half of the workforce.2 Sexual harassment is
recognized and prosecuted in courts of law. Women and men attend college in
equal numbers. The achievements are impressive indeed.
Yet the idea of equality has not served all women equally well. In the United
States,3 women continue to be excluded from the more prestigious and well-paid
occupations,4 to be ill-served medically, and to still be, by and large, the sexual
prey of men.5 Although early abortions are now legal throughout the nation, only
geographically or financially well-situated women have full access.6 Women’s
wages remain well below men’s, with only small increases achieved in the years
when equal pay and antidiscrimination legislation have been in force.7 Thus it is
 Introduction to the First Edition 9

hardly surprising that women are economically in a far more precarious position
than men.8 Two-thirds of poor and homeless persons in the United States are in
households headed by women. This looms as a specter for the middle-class as well
as the working-class mother who contemplates divorce or who fears her husband
will leave her and her children. The fate of children follows that of the mothers—
the impoverishment of women has meant the impoverishment of children.
Equality-based policies have failed women in the public arena as well as in the
private sphere, neither achieving their goal in representation in political office9 nor
in sharing of domestic chores and childrearing responsibilities.10 Despite liberal
commitments to the ideal, equality continues to elude us. In a nation such as the
United States, where the women’s movement (especially in its most organized
forms) has so unrelentingly marched to the tune of its ideal, can we attribute “the
marked contrast between the expectations and achievements of the women’s
movement” (Norris 1987, 144) to an unwise reliance on its dominance?
No doubt many impediments to a sexually egalitarian society derive from the
imperfect implementation of laws already in place, and from the grip—one might
better say, the stranglehold—that social convention has had on the formation of
gender identity. In recent years, socially as well as fiscally conservative politics and
reactionary social and religious movements have gained force, perhaps in part as a
response to liberal gains. These forces, generally hostile to gender equality, work to
impede and undo women’s gains. But not infrequently, conservative gender poli-
tics appropriates liberal rhetoric, as we will see when we look at the fate of welfare
“reform” in the United States.
Vigilance in the enforcement of laws already in place, together with efforts to
reshape the socialization of girls and boys, will do much to equalize power and
resources between men and women. But the pace at which we move toward
substantial equality even as the formal barriers to equality have fallen, the direction
of some change, and the uneven distribution of the benefits of advances among
different groups of women, have underscored the qualms of feminists who ques-
tion the goal itself.
In this book, I wish to explore one direction of such questioning, one which I
believe holds promise in redirecting social and political theory as well as feminist
strategies. The inquiry begins with a self-understanding of democratic liberal
nations as an association of free and independent equals. I want to challenge this
self-understanding for we are all at some time dependent. Many of us, mostly
women, also have to attend to the needs of dependents. The notion that we all
function, at least ideally, as free and equal citizens is not only belied by empirical
reality, it is conceptually not commodious enough to encompass all. I call this
challenge the dependency critique of equality.11
In making the case that equality will continue to elude us until we take seriously
the fact of human dependency and the role of women in tending to dependent
persons, I make use of a variety of voices. In Part I, “Love’s Labor,” I engage in a
constructive philosophical project to establish the moral significance of dependency
and its care, that is, the labor associated with it that I call dependency work. In Part II,
10 Introduction to the First Edition

“Political Liberalism and Human Dependency,” I interrogate the most thorough

vision of liberal egalitarianism of our time, the work of John Rawls, and conclude that
the norms and values underlying both the theory and the practice exclude the con-
cerns of dependency. Here I use a critical philosophical voice. In Part III, “Some
Mother’s Child,” I move away from recognizable philosophical idioms as I engage
with concrete realities: the first of these are policy questions that pertain to depen-
dency and those who do the work of dependency care—dependency workers. I
examine two policy initiatives undertaken in the United States in recent years, the
Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 and welfare “reform,” concluding that these
practical policies—like theoretical liberalism—do not acknowledge the nature and
contribution of dependency work. I explore policy proposals more consistent with the
concerns I highlight. While I suspend the abstract tone of philosophical discourse in
favor of a more sociological and political style, the tone is recognizably academic.
Chapter Six, in Part III, begins with a deeply personal account of my own encounters
with dependency, in particular with that of my own daughter—a grown woman
now—who is severely disabled. The final chapter of Part III combines the personal,
the sociological, and the philosophical as I rethink Sara Ruddick’s categories of
maternal thought in terms of the experiences of mothers of severely disabled children.
The many inflections—from the abstract to the concrete, from the constructive
to the critical, from the impersonal to the personal—have been necessary for car-
ving a path through a conceptual and psychological thicket. The encounter with
dependency is, I believe, rarely welcome to those fed an ideological diet of free-
dom, self-sufficiency, and equality. It was, after all, as a rejection of dependency on
the feudal lord that Rousseau (echoing the sentiment of his day) declared the
equality of men [sic]. But the deeper dependencies of infancy and early childhood,
frail old age, disease and disability, do not vanish in a revolution. We have no lords
to fight for this independence. So we have built fictions. But these fictions damage
us and with the demand of women to be included in the ideal of equality, we find
the limit of an ideal based on our putative independence. Therefore we have to use
our multiple voices to expose the fiction and rebuild a world spacious enough to
accommodate us all with our aspirations of a just and caring existence. That is the
thesis and the method I am pursuing here.
My approach to the question of feminism’s relation to the ideal of equality dif-
fers in significant ways12 from other approaches feminists have taken in criticizing
equality. The critiques take place in the context of lively debates, especially in
feminist legal theory, concerning the value and nature of the ideal of equality.
Though these debates deploy critiques that are different than my own, they are
relevant to the dependency critique. Therefore, I want to begin this journey with
the question: What does it mean to question the goal of sexual equality?

Equalities
A bumper sticker declares that women who seek equality with men lack ambition.
Marilyn Frye has mischievously called sexual equality still another “fine and
 Introduction to the First Edition 11

enduring patriarchal institution” (Frye 1983, 108). These quips succinctly put for-
ward a thesis that equality presupposes the measure of man as the measure of
humanity, and so obstructs our vision of what the world could be like if women
were truly free of male domination. The charge is not without merit. But one
wants to know, is this a charge against all and any conceptions of equality, against
the concept of equality itself, or against some particular conception?13
The question of equality fragments into questions of equalities.14 Equality for whom?15
Equality by what measure? Equality of what?16 Equal to what? Equal to whom? Enti-
tling her essay “Equalities,” feminist legal theorist Martha Minow (1991) asks us to
consider the different perspectives and norms which deem one situation equal to
some and unequal to others, equal by one measure, but unequal by another, equal
with respect to some stipulated factor, but unequal with respect to the desired one.
Minow is a theorist who, utilizing her own critical writings on equality, as well
as those of other feminists, has tried to shed light on the quest for justice sought by
various groups. Minow suggests that feminist challenges to equality highlight: first,
the need to contest norms implicit in decisions that likes have been treated as likes;
second, the importance of respecting the perspectives of the excluded; and third,
the importance of questioning the fairness and uncoerced character of the status
quo. These considerations, she points out, are relevant not only to women, but to
the many groups seeking equality.
To understand the import of these challenges, consider that the demand for
equality is, at its simplest: a demand by X, a group or individual we can call “the
constituency,” to be equal to Y, a group or individual we can call “the reference
class,” with respect to Z, some social good or capability. If we take Z to be equal
protection under the law, then the reference class (whose members presumably
have such protection) determines the standard of treatment that constitutes the
equality sought. But when the constituency differs from the reference class in a
manner that is pertinent with respect to the attainment of Z, then the failure to
achieve equality may be as much a problem of having taken the reference class as
the standard for measure, as it may be a failure of the constituency to be sufficiently
like the reference class to be comparable with respect to Z.
For instance, Minow analyzes the decision in Hernandez v. New York. The Supreme
Court rejected the claim that a Latino criminal defendant (here a member of the
constituency group of Latinos) was denied equal protection under the law when the
prosecution used the power of peremptory challenge to eliminate potential jurors who
were Latino. The plurality concluded that the defendant had failed to establish intent
on the part of the prosecutor to discriminate against Latinos. Minow argues that in this
case the monolingual English speaker—or the non-Spanish-speaking English
speaker—serves as the norm for jurors and thereby renders the presence of the bilin-
gual juror problematic. Instead, this case might have made the presence of jurors who
were not proficient in the language of the defendant a deficiency in the administration
of justice. To uncritically accept certain persons as the norm is to accept the status quo
as fundamentally nonproblematic. But the inclusionary17 nature of the ideal of equality
reveals the difficulty of its realization where the perspective of those who are dominant
12 Introduction to the First Edition

hold sway, where the norms which stand behind principles of universality and
impartiality go unquestioned, and where the status quo is complacently accepted.

Equality as Sexual Equality

Perhaps it is easier to say what assumptions underlie particular legal decisions than
what assumptions underlie such vast and malleable concepts as equality. Equality is
not only difficult to attain; it is, first off, difficult to define. What makes defining
this concept so formidable is the apparent simplicity of the idea, on the one hand,
and on the other, the numerous and sometimes conflicting suppositions buried in
each evocation of the concept. To say persons are equal is simply to say that they
are identical in relevant ways. Justice then seems to demand that if persons are
identical in relevant ways, irrelevant considerations must not enter into their
treatment. And, as the brief consideration of Hernandez v. New York suggests, what
is considered relevant and irrelevant is subject to contestation, since the criteria for
relevancy can be set so that hierarchies (wittingly or unwittingly) are perpetuated.
In its simplest formulation, equality is compatible with hierarchy and privilege, as
was clear to Aristotle who could consistently insist on the equality of citizens and
the ideas of “natural slavery” and the subordination of women. For Aristotle, all
the “relevant” differences necessitated exclusion of slaves and women. That is,
neither slaves nor (free) women possessed all the components of rationality requi-
site for citizenship in a polity.
Conceptions that are more modern sever the determinants of birth from the
determinants of one’s life chances. John Stuart Mill put it this way:

For what is the peculiar character of the modern world …? It is, that human
beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an
inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their
faculties, and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may
appear to them most desirable … In consonance with this doctrine, it is felt to
be an overstepping of the proper bounds of authority to fix beforehand, on
some general presumption, that certain persons are not fit to do certain things
(Mill 1986, 22).

One of the few great male champions of women’s equality, Mill promulgated a
view of equality he thought consistent with women’s aspirations. His view is
familiar to us in the concept of equality of opportunity. On some understandings,
those for example that embrace affirmative action, fair equality of opportunity can
necessitate different treatment. But it is not out of place to note that even Mill
supposed that women, not men, would take on childcare and domestic responsi-
bilities. Mill, seeing the injustice of women assuming both domestic responsibilities
(especially mothers too poor to hire servants) and other employment, restricted the
liberty of occupation to unmarried, childless, or very wealthy women. Gender
 Introduction to the First Edition 13

equality so conceived could, as Mill understood, serve only some—mostly privi-

leged—women.
“The root meaning of equality is negative,” Michael Walzer writes. “It aims not
at eliminating all differences but a particular set of differences, and a different set in
different times and different places” (Walzer 1983, xii). Mill was concerned to see
certain impediments to women’s equality end. His vision did not encompass the
possibility that men and women would share domestic duties such as childcare.
But what about the more recent demands of “equality feminists”—feminists
who have couched women’s demands in terms of equality? We should note that
feminism as it has evolved has embraced the demands not only of women of dif-
ferent ages, races, and ethnicities but also women with disabilities and sexual
minorities—that is, those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual.18
Three different formulations of the demand for gender equality can be articulated:
The first deems gender difference to be a morally illegitimate basis for the dis-
tribution of fundamental rights and duties, and for the division of advantages from
social cooperation—including economic benefits, liberties, political participation,
and so forth. It asks for equal opportunity and the elimination of any obstacles
based on gender or sexual identity.
The second also looks to the elimination of gender bias in legal, social, and
political institutions. However, its focus is not on equality with men, but on the
elimination of men’s sexual domination over women. It demands gender-neutral poli-
cies in all major institutions, especially the law. More recently, the scope of the
perceived injustice has been reformulated. It is the elimination of the sexual dom-
inance of heterosexual men over women and all sexual minorities.
The third seeks, more positively, the inclusion of women and sexual minorities
into all the spheres from which they have been excluded. Here the demand is for
positive strategies that result in the equal enjoyment by all sexes of the resources
and privileges now concentrated in the hands of men.
A presumption of equality, in all cases, is that members of the reference class, those from
whom the demands are made, share certain privileges. The expectation is that when the
demand for equality is satisfied, members of the constituency, those seeking equality, will
be included and thus benefit collectively and individually by their inclusion.

Feminist Critiques of Equality

We might … think of feminists as having chosen or drifted toward the second of
two possible responses (1) creating a world in which women cease to be the objects,
and start becoming the subjects (or agents), of competition; or (2) creating a world in
which women cease being merely the subjects, and start becoming the objects, of
compassion … The feminist ethos that emerges thus is not one in which women are
to imitate how men act toward each other in the world of competition, but rather
one in which women imitate, in their relationships with one another, certain aspects
of how women are supposed to act toward men. (Lugones and Spelman 1987, 244)
14 Introduction to the First Edition

Throughout women’s struggles many have assumed that expanding the possibilities
for women clearly necessitated demanding that which men had hoarded for
themselves.19 This seemingly obvious proposition overlooks the ways the standards
of equality are established by the hopes, aspirations, and values of those already
within the parity class of equals. They become the reference class for what is
understood as human, and for what benefits and burdens are to be shared. In this
way, the presumption of humanity as male—and of a certain class and complex-
ion—underlies much of what is striven for in the name of equality.
The review of feminist critiques of equality that follows lays the groundwork for
the development of the relation between women’s inclusion into the ideal, the fact
of human dependency, and women’s historic role in tending to dependents. I first
survey two critical approaches that have dominated feminist theory—both of
which come largely from feminist legal theory. Women’s differences from men,
both physiological and cultural, are the basis of the difference critique. The differ-
ence—not in properties possessed, but in hierarchy and power—constitutes the
basis for the dominance critique. A third critical approach sees both gender equality
and its feminist critics ignoring the importance of race, class, and other differences
in shaping the leading ideals of justice for women. I have called it the diversity cri-
tique. The final critique that I discuss, the dependency critique, forms the basis of this
book. Exploring the moral and political significance of the dependency critique
and the possibility of recuperating a conception of equality that incorporates
dependency will be the task of the remaining chapters.

The Difference Critique

The difference critique addresses the suppression of difference inherent in the first
formulation of equality, namely, that gender difference is a morally illegitimate
basis for the distribution of fundamental rights and duties. The difference theorist,
pointing to the predominance of largely heterosexual male-set standards in all areas
of public life, argues that demands to be equal to men forces women to accom-
modate themselves to conditions that comport poorly with their physiques and
lives. The negative intent of the first formulation is inadequate because even when
gendered barriers are removed, women are not competing for goals with the same
“equipment” (the same bodies, values, socialization, etc.) nor on the same terms (e.
g., responsibilities and expectations) as men. The contested assumption is the nor-
mative character of the reference class of men, especially white, heterosexual,
middle-class men, who implicitly set the standard for participation in the equal
opportunity to compete for social goods. This critique has given rise to intense
debate over such issues as pregnancy and maternity leaves, joint custody, and
comparable worth.
Feminists, in a number of areas of both theoretical and practical import, have
asserted the importance of women’s difference from men. They have claimed that
women make moral decisions differently from men, that there is an identifiable
epistemological stance that is attributable to women, and that we require laws and
 Introduction to the First Edition 15

policies recognizing woman’s particular role in procreation and parenting. Differ-

ence feminists reject the “notion that all gender differences are likely to disappear
or even that they should.”20 They urge special treatment so that women will not
be disadvantaged in the workplace and other public institutions. Alternatively, they
argue that the workplace must be altered to accommodate women’s special inter-
ests and needs. Equality feminists have responded that it is better to eliminate all
differences that are not innate and to analogize women’s situation to men’s situa-
tion in the remaining cases. But it is just the strategy of analogizing women’s
situation on the model of men’s that so irks the difference exponents, for it appears
to accept the male as the norm for humanity.
Defenders of the “equal treatment” approach, particularly in law, retort: First,
the equal treatment approach is aimed at getting the law “out of the business of
reinforcing traditional, sex-based family roles” and at appropriately altering the
workplace to make possible the “accommodation to parental needs and obliga-
tions,” and making these concerns central, not peripheral issues of the workplace
(see Williams 1985, 352–353). Second, continues Williams, the equal treatment
approach does not accept the male as standard, but attempts to fashion a model of
the androgynous worker.21 Third, the equal treatment approach rejects the notion
that distinctively female functions are something additional to males. They argue
that to accept that women have something additional is once again to accept the
standard of humanity as male. Better to insist on equal treatment and redefine the
standard of humanity to include concerns previously limited to women and to
exclude sex-based concerns not directly relevant to the issue at hand.22
Minow (1990), noting the difficulties of either ignoring difference or acknowl-
edging it, has spoken of the “dilemma of difference.” If we ignore, let us say, the
difference between men and women workers with respect to childbearing, we
have no adequate way to make demands relevant to pregnancy and employment. If
we insist on women’s special needs, we run the risk that employers will resist hiring
women because of the extra cost of pregnancy leaves. Minow suggests that the way
out of the dilemma is to see that differences are not properties attached to indivi-
duals per se, but are always relational, as is equality itself. We are different from
another and we are equal to another. At the same time, when that we assert that
another is different, we imply that we, too, are different—different from them. For
instance, to insist that difference is the property of a deaf child in a class of hearing
children—and so the deaf child must accommodate herself to her hearing peers—is
to ignore the fact that the hearing child is also different from the deaf child. Nei-
ther hearing nor deafness is inherently a difference. Instead the difference is in the
relation these children bear to one another.

The Dominance Critique

It may be argued that to affirm women’s difference—when difference has histori-
cally been conjoined with women’s subordination—is a gambit at best, foolhardy
at worst. The dominance critique addresses the second formulation of the demand
16 Introduction to the First Edition

for gender equality, which construes equality as a strategy to eliminate subordina-

tion and hierarchy. This critique questions not equality legislation’s suppression of
difference, but its efficacy in ending male domination. The dominance critique
urges not only that equality in a patriarchy is nothing but equality to men, but also
that the ideology of gender neutrality masks or ignores ways in which men and
women are differently situated in society with regard to the possession of power. Not
equality and difference, but subordination and domination are the relevant para-
meters for feminist change (MacKinnon 1987). The dominance critique opposes
both gender neutrality and the affirmation of difference, asserting that domination
precedes difference.23 By this, its exponents mean that the only salient differences
between men and women are those that become the basis for (or better still, are
the product of) domination. Neither policies based on women’s differences nor
policies based on their sameness are useful to the elimination of domination:
gender-neutral policies can only benefit those women who need it least, who are
least different than men because they are least subject to men’s domination, and
policies which acknowledge difference reinstate attributes that have significance
only by virtue of dominance.24 Thus, for example, policies of equal pay for equal
work only helps those women who are already sufficiently privileged to occupy
jobs that men occupy.25 But acknowledging that pay inequity is causally related to
the different employment of women’s and men’s work is also to acknowledge that
equalizing salary scales of similar or comparable occupations may not bring about the
end of subordination. In Sweden, pay scales are near parity (in part because of a
conscientious effort to make pay comparable across positions that men and women
are likely to hold), but a different form of subordination is in effect. Sex segrega-
tion in employment is very extensive—far more so than in the United States.
Positions of power and prestige still accrue to men.26
Those who dominate have the ability to create difference and then use that
difference to justify domination and inequality because they have the ability to
make their own perspective the one that defines both the problem and the solu-
tion. Where the playing field is not level and where the dominant group has the
power to define the issues, gender neutrality in the law does little to alter the
patterns of hierarchy and power. Modeling the women’s movement on the Civil
Rights movement in the United States, the dominance approach advocates enlist-
ing the power of the State to equalize the power discrepancy between women and
men. The dominance approach has been pursued especially with respect to situa-
tions in which men prey on women sexually, namely, sexual harassment and
pornography.27
By pointing to the ways in which women and men are differently situated vis-à-vis
power, exponents of the dominance critique intend to circumvent “difference.” Thus,
one would suppose that this approach would not come up against “the dilemma of
difference.” But the dominance approach can be seen as another variety of the differ-
ence approach, where the difference is a difference in power. This difference becomes
the defining mark of women; indeed, it becomes another essentialism,28 one in which
woman is defined as victim. Such an ascription, it is argued, undercuts the autonomy
 Introduction to the First Edition 17

of women and makes it hard to see how they can assume the role and responsibility of
full agents in the moral and political domain. Here the dilemma of difference re-
emerges. If we ignore the difference in power between men and women, we ignore
the difference in starting position of the different groups. Gender neutrality will only
perpetuate those differences that are already in play. If we highlight the difference, we
run the risk of reducing women to mere victims.

The Diversity Critique

Those who criticize the failure of equality theory and legislation to acknowledge
differences between men and women often speak as if the differences they identify
pertain to all women and to all men. Theorists who put forward the dominance
critique often speak as if all men were in possession of powers that all women
lacked. In this way they share the presumptions that all men are in possession of
some things women lack in more or less equal measure and that women will
benefit in more or less equal measure as they overcome the gender-based inequality.
Although some difference feminists have turned the lens of difference to the
situation of women themselves, women of color have been critical of difference
exponents who suppose that there are sufficient similarities among women (and
among men) to give rise to policies that equally favor women in all their variety.
Policies that simply address women fail to take into account problems arising from
the intersectionality of race, gender, class, disability, age, and so forth.29
Although dominance feminists have at times stressed the disparate impact of
equality on different groups of women, maintaining that the women most likely to
benefit from policies of equality are those least like women (i.e., with respect to
power), women of color have pointed out that men are themselves not equally
situated. bell hooks best expresses this critique of equality for women when she
writes: “Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class
structure, which men do women want to be equal to?” (hooks 1987, 62). Women
from the most oppressed groups, hooks proposes, “are more likely to see exag-
gerated expressions of male chauvinism among their peers as an expression of the
male’s sense of himself as powerless and ineffectual in relation to ruling male
groups, rather than an expression of an overall privileged social status.” She suggests
that these women’s early suspicions of feminism stem from the formulation of
feminist goals in terms of equality to men.
We can identify this critique as the diversity critique. It speaks to the diversity
amongst women that fails to be recognized in the demands of sexual equality.
More so still when those demands arise from women whose primary affiliations are
with dominant white middle-class men. Because the diversity critique aims at all
formulations of sex equality that mask intra-gender, as well as cross-gender,
inequalities, the diversity critique is neither opposed to nor does it necessarily
support other feminist critiques of sexual equality. We can say that it is orthogonal
to them. That is to say, however one looks at the question of gender equality, the
diversity among both men and women needs to be taken into account.
18 Introduction to the First Edition

The Dependency Critique

The dependency critique responds critically to the third formulation of sexual
equality, the inclusion of women into an association of equals, an inclusion that
gives women access to the rights and privileges previously held by men. Even this
more positive formulation is inadequate. The third demand asks for an equal share
of the pie. Yet, the dependency critique maintains that a pie composed of the
dreams and aspirations of men is not sufficiently nourishing. What is left out is just
what is omitted when society is supposed to be an association of equals. The
dependency critique avers that such a conception of society, while an immensely
important progressive ideal, is a limiting and limited ideal in the context of
woman’s subordination for a number of reasons.
First, the conception of society as an association of equals masks the inevitable
dependencies and asymmetries that form part of the human condition—those of
children, the aging and the ailing—dependencies that often mark the closest
human ties. Therefore the presumption effectively obscures the needs of the
dependents within society and women’s traditional roles in tending to those needs.
This presumption is brought to light in the question raised by Bernard Williams
(1973a): If inequalities brought about by different childrearing practices and
opportunities made available by parents to their children are to be rectified, can the
privacy of the family be sufficiently respected? Some writers have concluded that
this is a genuine problem in reconciling the autonomy of the family with the
demands of equal opportunity.30 From the vantage point of the dependency cri-
tique, we see these conflicts instead as an incoherence in the ideal itself.
Equality was first understood as a relation between heads of households, whose
families constituted their inviolable domain—but equality is also understood as an
equality among individuals and thus appears to reach into the family. When it
attempts to extend its reach, we see the deficiency of its conception in dealing with
persons who are dependents due to age, disability, or disease. For when laws
address a dependent within a family as an individual to whom equality is due, the
state appears to overstep its role vis-à-vis that individual responsible for the
dependent, and to limit the freedom of one citizen while promoting the equality
goals of another. Yet, why should it be thought that the freedom of a family head
is constrained when laws are made to pertain to a dependent within the family? It
is only because there remains a residue of the notion that the family head is the one
to whom the law is oriented—that those who are his dependents are within his
domain, not within the legal domain (unless, of course, he fails to properly attend
to his charges). But if the family head is the one to whom the law is directed, then
the ideal of equality pertains to the heads of the household and not to the depen-
dents within it. So we see that what looks like a conflict between the ideals of
freedom and equality is instead a conflict between two different understandings of
the subject of equality.31 As the understanding shifts between an equality that
pertains to each individual and to only independent persons, we miss the fact of
dependency. As we try to understand the relation between equality and
 Introduction to the First Edition 19

dependency, we discover the urgency of effecting substantial changes in our

understanding of dependency and its consequences for social organization.
Second, the presumption of equality obscures the extent to which many of our
societal interactions are not between persons symmetrically situated, even when
they are between individuals who might otherwise be autonomous. Moral, poli-
tical, and social theories have left us with a moral, and often legal, vacuum in
domains where women are likely to be at one end of the asymmetry. The
dependency critique shows that what is required is an appreciation of the inevitable
variety of human interactions and a more adequate understanding of what is
morally acceptable in asymmetric relations.
And finally, the equality possible when society is only conceived of as an association
of equals has trained our gaze on one side of the sexual division of labor: the inclusion
of women into the male half. As we look toward a change in gender roles, we must
seek strategies that aim to redistribute the labor on the female half. But as we do, it is of
special importance to explore the possible relation between policies of equality that
advance a few privileged, usually white upper and upper middle-class women, and the
growing impoverishment and deteriorating conditions of lower middle-class and
working-class women and women of color. As middle-class women abandon depen-
dency work, is that labor merely redistributed among other less well-situated women?
Nearly a decade before national welfare “reform,” Marilyn Friedman (1987) pointed
out that cutbacks on welfare force women into the service sector of the economy—
often into domestic service, thereby doing the domestic work that maintains many
middle- and especially upper-income families. Her observation that “many low-
income women now occupy a class position in relation to middle- and upper-income
families which parallels the position which the traditional wife occupied in relation to
her husband” (1987, 147) should alert feminists to the dangers of ignoring the
importance of dependency work in maintaining structures of domination and sub-
ordination that are tied to, if not entirely determined by, gender.32
I have saved discussion of the dependency critique for last not only because it
serves as the basis of what ensues, but also because I hope to highlight its contribu-
tion in light of the other critiques. Other feminist critiques of equality offer the
possibility that we can extend their analyses to other excluded groups. The ideal of
equality, as we currently find it formulated, underplays the specificity of various sorts
of exclusions. The gain in generalizing the feminist critiques is the identification of
those legal structures and strategies that resist and those that accommodate these
varied differences. But then perhaps gender is put into a bag of differences, and that
itself once again marginalizes the issues that confront women. The dependency cri-
tique homes in on one particular feature of women’s difference, her historically
assigned role as caregiver of dependents. The difference is contingent. Women need
not be the caregivers of dependents. But the persistence and pervasiveness of this
historical fact itself casts the shadow of doubt on women’s aspirations to equality.
Exponents of the dominance critique will be quick to point out that this is a
difference that is tied to women’s subordination. Care of dependents—dependency
work—is most commonly assigned to those in a society with the least status and
20 Introduction to the First Edition

power.33 Furthermore, attention to diversity cautions us not to assume that this is

still another universal attribute of women, for not all women care for dependents.
Caring labor is assigned to women differently depending on race, class, ability and
age, and men of marginalized groups are often also assigned to care for dependents.
In developing the dependency critique, we need to draw on the insights of the
difference, dominance, and diversity critiques.
First we should see, however, that the dependency concerns which motivate the
dependency critique are not reducible to either issues of difference or dominance.
Dependency work may confer difference on women. But it is not a difference
whose desirability or disadvantage we should be debating. Whether the work of
caring for dependents is viewed as desirable or not—as conferring advantage or
disadvantage—it is work that must be done by someone. Rather than ask if
women’s care of dependents results in them being marked as different, we need to
ask whether doing dependency work excludes those who do it from the class of
equals, and if so, what we must understand and do to end this exclusion.
Similarly, with respect to dominance and dependency, we can recognize that if
the world were to magically become a place where no domination could be found,
there would still be dependents in need of care. The dependency critique con-
siders, then, the inescapable fact of human dependency and the ways in which such
labor makes one vulnerable to domination.
Finally, while the diversity critique cautions against falsely generalizing from the
dependency concerns of some women to all women, we cannot even begin to
address issues of equality between women without examining the place of depen-
dency work in the lives of women and in the social order. Dependency issues form
the nexus of women’s lives with men and with other women. Where women
subordinate other women and where women dominate other women and other
men, we are likely to find dependency matters at issue. To heed the insights of the
diversity critique, attention must be given to the dependency critique.
I have argued that the dependency critique is not reducible to other feminist
critiques of equality, nor to concerns of other groups who are also excluded from
the ideal. Nonetheless, an extension of its insights is suggested by the experiences
of those women engaged in dependency work. Those experiences highlight the
ways in which members of human communities are engaged in interdependencies.
They emphasize the fact that the independent individual is always a fictive creation
of those men sufficiently privileged to shift the concern for dependence onto
others. Understandings of equality that remain based in the independence of indi-
viduals, whether they call for equality simpliciter or sex equality, will also exclude
as they include.

Should Women Still Want Equality?

Ought women to continue to assert claims to equality or ought women’s goals to
be cast in different terms and be less marked by a philosophy steeped in patriarchal
values? On the one hand, an overemphasis on equality, however formulated, misses
 Introduction to the First Edition 21

the importance of the asymmetries and differences that are unavoidable and even
desirable in human intercourse. On the other hand, the ideal is so intimately bound
to progressive ideals of justice, freedom, and the elimination of oppression, that it is
barely conceivable that a progressive agenda can do without some suitable con-
ception of equality. Feminist theorists have questioned—often with much justifi-
cation—conceptions of equality. These formulations are dominant but not exhaustive
understandings.
The many responses to the dominance and difference critiques, which have been
offered in recent years, engage the criticisms and search for better ways to retain
the aspiration that men and women can share the world in equality. Martha
Minow’s strategy is to question the norms that define difference, rather than sup-
pressing difference in favor of equality or underscoring difference and foregoing
equality. Like the dominance critique, Minow takes difference not as marking the
inherent characteristic of the one so labeled but as arising from a relationship where
one party has the power to label another as different. A conception of equality, she
argues, requires an appreciation of the relational character of difference and of the
rights that are precipitated from the claims of equality.34
A number of other legal theorists have attempted to respond to the debate in
ways that preserve the strengths of both the critiques of equality and its defense.
Christine Littleton argues for “equality across difference” (1987b) and Drucilla
Cornell (1991) proposes a model that eschews equality in favor of equivalence—
although equivalence can be thought of not as a rejection of the concept of
equality, but a refinement. Deborah Rhodes (1989) espouses a disadvantage model.
She argues with Littleton that the problem with difference is the disadvantage that
it brings, and that a theoretical position should not try to get rid of difference, but
only the disadvantage of a particular difference. Rhodes’s disadvantage approach may
be seen as a way to acknowledge the power differences between women and
men—in exploring ways that law and policy can remediate disadvantages in
women’s situations—without defining women by their subordination. Never-
theless, the elimination of disadvantage is nonetheless an equalizing strategy. All of
these approaches affirm the aspiration of equality even as the liberal articulations are
questioned.
The critics of equality are right in thinking that equality will continue to elude
us as long as we work within traditional articulations of equality. We need a con-
ception that addresses the truths about human lives and human relations that fem-
inists have uncovered in their labor to take women’s experiences seriously.
Borrowing from Walzer again, we note that our dreams of equality are shaped by
the norms and values of the society in which we live—values and norms fashioned,
in large measure, by those in power. When women are the ones who tend to care
for dependents, their just demands will fall outside the compass of an equality
fashioned by these norms and values.
If this is right, then what? Should we abandon the political ideals that provide
the foundations of democratic society? Should women abandon their supportive,
caring, and nurturant ideals, decline to have children, or decline to care for their
22 Introduction to the First Edition

children once born? And if they do, then what? Who would care for these chil-
dren? How would the relational and nurturant needs of society, the binding of
society, take place?
Neither option is conceivable. The present work is intended to clear the way for
an understanding of equality that is compatible with dependency concerns, that
understands not only the demands of fairness, but the demands of connection. The
distinctive contributions of women’s work in tending to dependents bring dis-
tinctive values. In the moral domain, this contribution has been identified as the
voice of care. It is a voice that is too frequently preempted in the public domain by
the voice of justice. Equality is an ideal of justice—its domain is rarely understood
to include the values and virtues of care.
Feminist thinkers have begun to formulate a moral theory and a politics groun-
ded in the maternal relation, the paradigm of a relation of care.35 Although the
maternal relation is a paradigm, it is meant to be used metaphorically, not literally.
Drawing on different aspects of the maternal relation, the metaphorical strands
serve to illuminate relevant moral and political values and relationships. Feminist
efforts to delineate an ethical and political model based on the non-egalitarianism
involved in caring relations, together with the critical evaluation of egalitarian
policies discussed in this chapter—and the possibility that policies of equality have a
different impact on differently situated women—help stake the project I undertake
here. Of special concern is that the achievement of equality, which uses white
middle-class men as the measure, improves the lives of some women at the cost of
a greater degree of inequality for other women.36 An understanding of equality
which asks only to share the goods of the dominant group without inquiring into
the values and labor of those who are subordinated risks merely shifting the burden
of some members of the subordinate group to others who have less power—rather
than distributing those burdens more fairly across the population.
Acknowledging human dependency and its consequences for those who do the
work of caring for dependents, I will argue, is indispensable for finding a route
around these obstacles to a truly inclusive feminism. The domains of caring and
equality, an ideal of justice, need to be brought into a dialectical relation if we are
to genuinely meet both the concerns of dependency and the demands of equality.
As the relation of the moral stances of care and justice has become elaborated, it
has become increasingly clear that a simple opposition between care and justice is
inadequate to the needs of our moral and political lives.37 Although Gilligan is
perhaps most responsible for presenting the two moral voices as opposing ones, in
another context she describes an interaction between a young girl and a young boy
that points the way to a different understanding. The girl wants to play neighbor;
the boy wants to play pirates. A fair solution would be to play pirates for a certain
amount of time and then switch to playing neighbors for an equal amount of time.
But the young girl has another solution. She suggests that they play a game in
which the neighbor is a pirate. Gilligan calls the girl’s solution “inclusive” rather
than “fair.” In the fair solution, both games remain in their original conception. In
the inclusive solution a new game emerges. There is a transformative potential
 Introduction to the First Edition 23

here. To incorporate the needs and values which women have attended to requires a
transformation making equality truly inclusive. In the following chapter, I suggest that
such a concept is adumbrated in the adage that “we are all some mother’s child.”

Notes
1 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex—even
disallowing requirements that adversely impact on women—save in the case where an
employer can show compelling reason why gender itself, or a qualification that has an
adverse impact on women, is essential for the job. The Pregnancy Amendment to Title
VII prohibits employers from dismissing a worker because she is pregnant or from
imposing an extended mandatory leave because of pregnancy. According to Title IX,
schools must provide equal educational facilities, even in the area of sports. Efforts to
attain sexual equality have brought easier access to education—more than 50% of the
college population is female—as well as to women’s entrance into professions such as
law and medicine, and arguably women now experience greater sexual freedom.
2 Between 1940 and 1994, the percentage of women in the labor force rose from 24% to
46% (Herz and Wootten 1996, 45, 47). In 2016, the US Labor Department, Women’s
Bureau reported that women constituted 46.8% of the labor force; and projected that by
2024 women would constitute 47.2% of the labor force. See www.dol.gov/wb/stats/
NEWSTATS/latest/demographics.htm (last accessed April 7, 2018).
3 In a comparative study of sexual equality, Pippa Norris writes, “In certain societies such
as the United States, one of the most striking phenomena is the marked contrast
between the expectations and achievements of the women’s movement. …The
woman’s movement has been highly vocal in pressing for equal pay over the last twenty
years, but the average pay packet for full-time American women workers compared
with that of men is lower than in almost all European countries. …Compared with the
European Community, America has one of the highest proportions of women in the
labour force, but …their average wages are among the lowest” (Norris 1987, 144). As
recently as 2017, white women who were employed full-time had weekly earnings that
were 82% of those of white male full-time workers; Black women’s were 93% of Black
men’s; and Hispanic women’s earnings were 87% of Hispanic men’s (U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics, 2018, 1). In addition, she comments on the female nouveau poor due to
high divorce rates, single-parent families, and a less comprehensive and generous welfare
system. Norris also remarks on the other objective inequalities American women suffer
including the paucity of legislative and other governmental representation.
4 For example, in 1994, 8.5% of all engineers were women (up from 4% in 1981). Women
engineers earned 86.5% of men’s salaries. Meanwhile 73.8% of teachers, other than college
and university level, were women (in 1981 the figure was 70%) earning 87% of men’s
salaries in the same occupation. Among college and university teachers 36.4% were
women, earning 86.6% of men’s salaries. While 92.3% of all nurses were women, at the
same time, only 23.2% of all physicians were women (up from 14% in 1981) earning
76.7% of men’s salaries. Among lawyers, 31% were women, earning 74.1% of men’s sal-
aries, while 98.8% of secretaries were women (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1994). The pat-
tern persists in 2017. While 31% of women were employed in professional and related
occupations compared with 20% of men, men were in higher paying jobs. According to
the US Bureau of Labor Statistics: “In 2017, 10 percent of women in professional and
related occupations were employed in the relatively high-paying computer (median
weekly earnings of $1,235 for women and $1,552 for men) and engineering ($1,307 for
women and $1,518 for men) fields, compared with 46 percent of men. Women were
more likely to work in education ($935 for women and $1,202 for men) and health care
($1,068 for women and $1,341 for men) jobs, which generally pay less than computer and
engineering jobs.” (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2017, 6)
24 Introduction to the First Edition

5 According to the Department of Justice, for example, “during each year women were
the victims of more than 4.5 million violent crimes, including approximately 500,000
rapes or other sexual assaults. In 29% of the violent crimes against women by lone
offenders the perpetrators were intimates—husbands, former husbands, boyfriends or
former boyfriends” (U.S. Department of Justice 1995). See also Blum et al. (1973, 49–
58) for a staggering array of statistics on rape, violence, sexual harassment, and the sex
industry. For up-to-date information see Truman and Morgan (2014).
6 The 1976 Hyde Amendment banned federal funding for abortions, and prohibits Med-
icaid funding for abortions except in cases of rape or incest (Stone 1996, 178). Further-
more, Title X funding which provided family-planning clinics that many women of
color depended on was cut between 1980 and 1990 (Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1991).
In addition, 83% of the counties in the U.S. (metropolitan areas among them) are
without identifiable abortion facilities (Henshaw and Vort 1987, 63). All of these above
factors conspire against poor women.
7 Overall women make 76.4 cents for every one of men’s dollars. The median weekly
salary for women in 1994 was $399 compared to men’s $522 (Bureau of Labor Statistics
1994). For comparable 2017 figures see Note 3 above.
8 Although there are women making top salaries in major law firms and corporations,
even in 1993, single, female-headed households earned a median yearly salary of
$17,413 compared to $26,467 for single, male-headed households. Race exacerbates
the difference. The median income for white women who were single parents was
$19,962, while the income for black single mothers was $11,905, and income for
Hispanic single mothers was $12,047 (Bureau of the Census 1994). Among union
workers, white women earned 85.3% of white men’s wages; black women earned
86.3% of black men’s wages; and Hispanic women earned 79.4% of Hispanic men’s
wages. Among non-union workers, white women earned 75.2% compared to white
men; black women earned 86.3% compared to black men; and Hispanic women
earned 91.5% compared to Hispanic men (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1994). See also
Note 4 above for figures from 2017.
9 Even though women in the United States have had the rights of citizenship since 1920,
and participate at all levels of electoral politics, in 1995, only 11% of Congress were
women (forty-eight women in the U.S. House of Representatives and eight women in
the Senate); 26% of statewide elected officials were women; 21% of state legislators were
women; and 18% of all mayors were women. The much-touted efforts of President
Clinton to increase women’s visibility in high office only brought that figure to 29%.
With the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginzburg to the Supreme Court the number of
women on the Supreme Court increased to two (Center for the American Woman and
Politics [CAWP] 1995; National Women’s Political Caucus [NWPC] 1995). The elec-
tions of 2018 saw a surge in the number of women who sought and won elected office.
While the proportion of elected officials is far from being at parity, according to the
Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics, “In 2019, 127 women serve in the U.S. Congress.
Twenty-five women serve in the Senate and 102 women in the House. The number of
women in statewide elective executive posts is 86, and the proportion of women in state
legislatures is 28.8 percent” (Center for American Women and Politics 2019). The
increase has been credited to the unpopularity of the Trump administration among
women. In 2019, there are three women on the Supreme Court.
10 Women working full-time in households shared by adult men do 83% of household
chores and childrearing, while women employed full-time outside the home do 70%
(Stone 1990, 33).
11 A number of feminist scholars have contributed to my own writings on the relation
between equality and dependency. The work of Susan Okin has been immensely valu-
able in elucidating the role of women’s social position in the family as the source of her
exclusion from the political domain. Her work, including her discussions of John Rawls,
which I both draw upon and take issue with, has been very important in crystallizing my
own thinking. Within legal thought Martha Fineman has vigorously pursued what I
 Introduction to the First Edition 25

think of as the dependency critique of equality, especially in the publication of The

Illusion of Equality but also in the Neutered Mother. Much of my earlier thinking had been
developed independently of the work of Martha Fineman, and when I found Fineman’s
work, I found the confluences both illuminating and heartening. My own work draws
heavily on the feminist project of a care ethic and the attempt to gain moral, social, and
political insight from the caring work of mothering.
12 Martha Fineman’s approach is most similar to my own. See Note 13.
13 Rawls distinguishes a concept and a conception with respect to justice:
Thus it seems natural to think of the concept of justice as distinct from the various
conceptions of justice and as being specified by the role which these different sets of
principles, these different conceptions, have in common. Those who hold different
conceptions of justice can, then, still agree that institutions are just when no arbitrary
distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties and
when the rules determine a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages
of social life (Rawls 1971, 5).
It seems natural to import such a distinction to the discussion of equality.
14 See Rae (1989).
15 See Minow (1991).
16 See Sen (1989a).
17 James Bohman points out that a problem with equality is that it is at some times
exclusive when it ought to be inclusive, and, at other times, overly inclusive. See
Bohman (1996).
18 The inclusion of the concerns of sexual and gender minorities has motivated me to
somewhat reformulate the earlier text.
19 There have always been feminists who have questioned equality in this form—who have
always understood that the meaning of feminism should not be constrained by the
measure of man. Even Wollstonecraft, who is generally thought to be the “equality
feminist” par excellence, was careful to insist that women not merely copy (the myriad
follies of) men. Also see Note 22.
20 It should be noted that from the eighteenth century onward there have been two distinct
arguments for women’s emancipation. One insisted on the egalitarian argument: Men and
women share essentially the same human character, and denial of these commonalties has
kept women out of positions of privilege and away from resources. The other has insisted
on the value of women’s difference, arguing for women’s suffrage because, were women
to be introduced into the political and social arena, they would inject new characteristics
into these areas; that women’s difference from man would benefit all humanity.
21 Christine Littleton, a difference feminist, has remarked that the problem with the model
of androgyny is that women’s values tend to be too little valued to get fair representa-
tion, and citing Carrie Menkel-Meadow, she remarks, “The trouble with marble cake is
that it never has enough chocolate” (Littleton 1987a, 224). Also see Littleton (1987b).
22 The issue emerges most clearly as it pertains to pregnancy. The equality strategy is to
analogize or assimilate pregnancy leaves to disability leaves. See Williams (1985). Wil-
liams argues for an understanding of pregnancy as disability, not because pregnancy is
inherently a disability, but because in the context of the workplace pregnancy can be
disabling to a person as a worker. Responding to arguments that the equality position
simply integrates women into a male world, Williams, a feminist, writes: “The goal of
the feminist legal movement … is not and never was the integration of women into a
male world any more than it has been to build a separate but better place for women.
Rather, the goal has been to break down the legal barriers that restricted each sex to its
predefined role and create a hierarchy based on gender.”
23 MacKinnon puts it this way: “On the first day that matters dominance was achieved,
probably by force. By the second day, division along the same lines had to be relatively
firmly in place. On the third day, if not sooner, differences were demarcated …”
(MacKinnon 1987, 40).
26 Introduction to the First Edition

24 MacKinnon writes: “You can be the same as men, and then you will be equal.” or
“You can be different from men, and then you will be women” (DuBois et al. 1985, 21).
25 MacKinnon characteristically puts it more tendentiously. Speaking of comparable worth,
she asks how you compare when there are no men around to make the needed com-
parison—men have found better things to do.
26 See Adams and Winston (1980, 2, 3, 6, 7, 26). Yet Sweden has made and continues to
make a concerted effort to move toward gender equality in all its registers. See “Gender
Equality in Sweden”,
https://sweden.se/society/gender-equality-in-sweden.
27 For example, Catharine MacKinnon has urged such policies with respect to sexual har-
assment, and together with Andrea Dworkin has drafted an antipornography ordinance
that explicitly signals pornography as a harm directed at women and against which
women ought to have special recourse. For a statement of what I call the dominance
critique, see especially MacKinnon (1987).
28 See Drucilla Cornell’s critique of MacKinnon (Cornell 1991, 119–164).
29 “Intersectionality” is the term employed by Kimberly Crenshaw (1991) to denote the
ways in which women’s multiple identities create problems which are not addressed
when women of color are seen on the one hand as “women,” on the other hand as
“persons of color,” but never as “women of color.”
30 See especially Fishkin (1983), who examines the issue in considerable detail.
31 Perhaps then it is simply time to rid ourselves of the vestiges of head of household
equality and hold fast to individual-based equality. The problem here, as I will argue in
more detail later (Chapter Three), is that there remain important reasons why the one
responsible to a dependent should have a certain jurisdiction, and so treating a depen-
dent as a fully independent citizen is not without difficulties.
32 I would include here the very act of bearing children, as in the practice of “surrogate”
mothering, which is often undertaken by poorer women on behalf of middle-class
women. For an interesting discussion of the moral ramifications of this, see the discus-
sion stimulated by Keane and Breo (1981) in Singer and Wells (1985, 105–106). See also
Friedman (1998).
33 For instance, Virgina Held points out—citing a U.S. Department of Labor publication—
that on a scale from 887 (the lowest skill level) to 1 (the highest skill level) “the skill
thought to be needed by a homemaker, childcare attendant, or nursery school teacher
was rated …878” (Held 1983, 9). See also Young (1983) and Bart (1983).
34 One can say that the relational move is an analogical one. In a case such as Hernandez v.
New York, discussed above, it requires that we locate those variables in the juridical
peerage that translate across the linguistic difference between Anglos and Latinos.
35 Carol Gilligan (1982), Sara Ruddick (1989), Nel Noddings (1984), Annette Baier
(1994), and Virginia Held (1993). For an attempt to formulate a politics based on prin-
ciples of care see Tronto (1993). There have been many writings on care and its rela-
tionship to politics since the initial publication of this book. For a summary see Keller
and Kittay (2017).
36 That is to say, the greater inter-gender equality may contribute to a greater intra-gender
inequality among women, not only because the ceiling is raised for some women, but
because the floor is lowered for others. See Sen (1993). As distasteful a prospect as this
presents, the question cannot be evaded when the rise of some women into fields and
high-income-earning professions previously closed to them is temporally, at least, coin-
cident with the impoverishment of many other women. These concerns echo MacK-
innon’s claim that gender-neutral policies only benefit those women who, in their
situation, are already most like men. However when the comparison among women is
made with respect to dependency work, it is as often women as men who exert the
power over the worse-situated women.
37 See Held (1995), Clement (1996), and Bubeck (1995). Also see also Engster (2007),
Slote (2007), and Tronto (2013).
PART I

Love’s Labor
The Requirements of Dependency
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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THE ‘Sylo’ REG .

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The Brompton Outfit, similar to above but cheaper
Boiler and Bottles. Complete with thermometer and 6
No. 4 Bottles (26 oz.), 13/11 Extra Bottles, 2/6 per doz.
For other Patterns please ask for Season’s List.
Fish Slices. 4 in., 0/8; 4¾ in., 0/10; 5½ in., 1/0
No. I R 518 Flesh or Dishing Forks. 14 16 18 20 in.
6d. 8d. 10d. 1/0
New Improved Rack for storing Fruit or
Vegetables. Strong Wrought-iron Frame
with sliding Wood Shelves.
No. of
Sizes Price
shelves
6 24 by 18 by 24 in. high 7/9 *14/6
8 24 ,, 18 ,, 36 ,, ,, 11/6 *19/11
12 24 ,, 18 ,, 48 ,, ,, 14/6 *23/9
Any size made to order.
* Price, with door and enclosed with Wire

FLOUR
FLOUR
No. I R 100. Japanned Oak Flour Bin. (Flat Top).
Bins for Flour. Japanned Blue with
Bushels.
Black Hoops (as design). Pecks:
1 1½ 2 3 4 6
56 84 112 168 224 336 lbs. ½ ¾ 1 1½ 2 3
8/11 11/0 13/6 17/0 18/6 24/0 7 10 14 21 28 42 lbs.
Six Bushels size procured to order only. 3/6 3/8 3/11 4/9 5/9 7/0
Round Galvanised Iron Flour or Corn Bins.
2 4 6 8 bushels.
9/3 14/6 17/9 23/6 to order
[996]

FLOWER POTS OR JARDINIERES.

 No. I R 4055. No. I R 4208.
Fern Pot, Brass or Copper, Fern Pot.
Bronze Copper Fern Pot,
Diameter 3¾ in. 4½ in. Copper or Brass.
Fluted. 2/5 each.
Plain 1/2 1/11 4 in. diam. 1/1 each.

No. I R 4622. Polished No. I R 2653.

Antique Copper Fern Hammered Copper No. I R 3336. Brass
Pot, with Oxidised Fern Pot. 4 in. or Copper
Silver Mounts, diam., 3¾ in. high, Jardinière.
4 in. diam. 5/6 each. 4/0 4 in. 5 in. 6 in. 7 in.
6/0 9/0 13/6 14/6

No. I R 5313. Polished

No. I R 5281. Handsome Brass Brass Jardinière, 8 in.
Jardinière. Gilt Finish, diam., 17/6
8 in. diam., 16/9

No. I R 5430. Polished No. I R 3537. Brass

No. I R 5429. Polished
Brass Jardinière. 7 in. Jardinière. 8 in., 13/9;
Brass or Copper Jardinière,
diam., 8/9 10 in., 16/6;
7 in. diam., 5/3
12 in., 22/0 each.
 No. I R 5276. Brass
Jardinière, 6 in. diam., 8/6 No. I R 5465. Handsome
Brass Jardinière, 11 in.
diam., 31/6

No. I R 5536. Polished Brass No. I R 5470. Brass Jardinière.

Jardinière, 8 in. diam., 11/3 each 11 in. diam., 33/6

Brass Wire Epergne Frames for

Cut Flowers.
Diam. ins. 4 5 6 7
No. I R 5304 Polished Brass 0/6 0/7 0/9½ 0/10
Bulb or Rose Bowl. ,, ,, 8 9 10 11 12
1/0 1/2 1/3 1/6 1/10
4¾ 6½ 8 10 in.
6/6 7/11 9/9 11/9
Glass Linings for ditto.
4/9 5/0 5/6 5/11

No. I R 5371. Bulb Bowls,

The Floraform, with heavy Polished Brass with Copper
cast foot for arranging cut finished zinc linings,
flowers artistically. In 5½ in. diam., 6/11
Lacquered Brass Wire. Pottery linings, 9d. each.
6 10 12 15 loop. Rose Bowl Nets, 1/0
0/8½ 0/10½ 1/0 1/2 each.
 The Patent Teneflos. Makes the
arrangement of cut flowers easy and
No. I R 5372. Bulb Bowl, Polished simple, with artistic effect. Entirely made
Brass with Copper finished Zinc of copper. Diam.—
linings, 7½ in. diameter, 9/11. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 in.
Pottery linings, 1/8. Rose Bowl Nets, 0/10 0/11 1/0 1/2 1/4 1/6 1/8 1/10
1/6

No. I R 2950. Brass

or Copper
Jardinière.
6½ 7½ 8½ in.
13/9 18/9 22/6

No. I R 4363. Pot or Jardinière

Stand, 34 in. high, 10 in. diam.
at top. Rough Armour Bright
with Antique Copper Tray,
No. I R 439.
15/9; All Dull Brass, 23/9;
Antique Brass
Ditto, 12 in. diam. at top,
Jardinière on
19/6, 27/0
Armour Bright
Stand, 29/9
 No. I R 478. The
“Fairy” Flower
Holder, made of
520 1259 3380
zinc and will not
rust. Diam., 3 in., NEW DESIGNS OF “FLORAL AID”
0/6½; 3½ in., Floral Aid for Arranging Cut
0/10½; 4 in., 1/1 Flowers Naturally in open Bowls,
each etc, 0/4, 0/6, 0/10½, 1/2, 2/3, 3/9

No. I R 440. Polished Brass

Pot and Stand. 48/0
complete.

Prices subject to market fluctuations.

[997]

FOOT SCRAPERS, Etc.

No. I R 3 B.
Combination Scraper and Brush, 9/6 Wrought Foot Scraper, 3/8

No. 902. Scraper Mat.

No. I R 6. Foot Scraper, with Brushes, 24 in. × 12 in., 2/6; 28 in. × 14 in., 3/3;
15 in. long, 9/11; 18 in. long, 11/3 30 in. × 16 in., 4/0; 33 in. × 16 in., 4/4;
36 in. × 18 in., 5/4
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