VIRGNIA TAPSCOTT: I'm a stay-at-home mum. Stop telling me I'm 'letting down the sisterhood'.

Do you value care work, paid or unpaid?

Do you believe that work should be supported?

Do you believe that a woman’s contribution to society is inherently different, but not less valuable than, a man’s contribution to society?

If you answered yes to those questions, you might be a 'care feminist'. Care feminists believe true equality can only be attained by appropriately valuing and supporting care work rather than simply enabling people to avoid it. They believe care is a necessary function in society worth preserving through various support measures, rather than something to be minimised. They believe that ultimately the emancipation of women relies on the freedom to choose to perform both paid and unpaid work without penalty.

I became a care feminist when the doctor pulled my first born out of a six-inch incision in my abdomen. On experiencing childbirth, breastfeeding and the care of babies firsthand I realised that due to my body parts my contribution to society could never be exactly the same as a man’s. Not less, just different. I also gained a better appreciation of how incredibly challenging, important and rewarding the work of care is.

I came to the conclusion that my contribution should be equally valued rather than considered something ‘lesser’ or something to be avoided. I became increasingly dissatisfied with the idea that I was only considered valuable and ‘equal’ if I was present in the workplace; the suggestion that I was somehow letting down the sisterhood by engaging in unpaid care work.

According to care feminism, equal workforce participation is a deeply flawed measure of equality. Unless we can teach men how to give birth and breastfeed and produce more female sex hormones, women will remain at an inherent disadvantage when it comes to workforce participation and men will remain at an inherent disadvantage when it comes to caring for babies. It’s not an equal playing field, and many people have identified this issue, so why do we continue holding women up to the measure of men? Why aren’t we constantly shaming men with national unpaid workforce participation graphs plastered across the TV?

Watch: If a man lived like a woman for a day. Post continues after the video.

It stems from deeply entrenched beliefs that men and the work typically associated with them is more valuable than women and the work they do. If we want evidence of how this long-held association between women and care work causes devaluation of that work we only have to examine the lower wages and poor conditions that characterise the paid care work sector. Feminisation of sectors consistently leads to lower pay and is a well-documented phenomenon. For example, when teaching was the sole domain of men it was highly valued and respected work, but over time as it became dominated by women, conditions worsened. It’s this pervasive idea that women don’t need to be paid much, or at all, for their work because their time is less valuable and they do it out of love.

These archaic beliefs even today continue to drive our assumption that women are the problem and must change the kind of work they do in order to be valued. Using only paid workforce participation as a measure of equality perpetuates the assumption that men and their full-time paid work patterns are the gold standard. Based on these assumptions and beliefs, it seems a natural response for women to attain rights and elevate their status in society by adopting full time paid work patterns and distancing themselves from the work of care.

Enter career feminism. Career feminists believe that women can simply reduce their oppressive circumstances through disengaging with care work. Many women exist in positions of financial security, power and influence today because they have been enabled to do less care work. Before I had children, I fit the definition of a career feminist.

The problem with this approach is that not all women will be able to avoid care work and not all women will want to. It’s an approach that has favoured wealthy white women who are best positioned to leverage existing power structures. Also, people don’t magically start needing less care, the care needs will always exist and there are few ways to circumvent this human need without negative consequences. We see evidence of this in the quality issues experienced in the aged care, disability care and childcare sectors. Someone still has to do the care work, mostly women, except we now we either do it for money or in a compressed amount of time and in addition to our paid work obligations. The fact that many women, particularly single mothers, have no choice but to return to paid work is seen by care feminists as a novel source of oppression.

The early women’s rights movements were revolutionary and super important, but they gained success and momentum by actually subscribing to the assumption that women’s work was less valuable and men’s work was to be pursued as the solution. They failed to assign value to the feminine contribution. Early career feminism also, in some instances, degraded the work of care in order to justify a woman’s ‘emancipation’ from the home front.

It was far more realistic at that time to leverage existing power structures than to tear down the power structures and redefine what was considered valuable in society. Rather than addressing the conditions that make care work oppressive, we simply endeavoured to protect ourselves by doing less of that work, which is understandable in a context of not having the right to vote or own property. By focusing solely on measures that enabled women to disengage from care work, career feminists unwittingly perpetuated the deeply misogynistic view that men’s work should be prioritised over ‘women’s work’.

Care feminism has risen to prominence in Australia in recent years thanks to the likes of Sam Mostyn and Kristin Ziwica, but a troubling emphasis remains on improving ways to avoid care work. Care feminism in Australia seems to centre on improving the conditions of care work but only as long as it’s paid. Care feminists in Norway and other Scandinavian regions have succeeded in securing care allowances and shorter working hours for parents, policies that genuinely support the act of unpaid care itself as well as paid work.

In Australia care work continues to erode our financial independence and disconnects us from power and influence. Care work remains one of the main sources of our oppression. Obviously, we can’t live in a society that doesn’t exist yet, but to accept the current trajectory of women’s empowerment through simply disengaging with care work will continue to leave many women behind, overburden women and lead to substandard delivery of care. The unfinished business of feminism is to implement both care and career feminist theory in policy development. Now that women have made it all the way to the top of the power structures of governance and the market economy, we must wield that power to finally assign true value to women and their work.

Feature Image: Supplied. 

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