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The question of what to do about care-giving has garnered a great deal of
attention recently among feminists, as women continue to want and to need to enter the
workforce in massive numbers, facing a workplace where their advancement is still
hindered by discrimination and disparity in pay. Yet these women continue to provide
the bulk of care-giving at home, expected to somehow find the time and resources to
function as primary care-givers. Responding to the difficult position this double-duty of
work and care has placed on women, some feminist scholars have focused attention on
the marginalization of care-giving as an impediment to the realization of full and equal
citizenship for women, arguing for measures that respond to the realities of women as
care-givers, particularly as working care-givers that are prone to the dangers of poverty.
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Other feminist scholars insist that focusing on wage work represents the best route to full
citizenship for women, resisting as counterproductive to emancipation and equality any
move to further encourage or associate women's role with the care of dependents.
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This contemporary care-work debate encompasses a wide range of positions and
approaches, but the legacy of Republican Motherhood, and the system of domesticity that
was ultimately cemented into its modern-day operation by the New Deal, to varying
degrees, shapes and drives the debate and the differing approaches to promoting full and
equal citizenship for women in America. Those who support wage work as a means to
achieving equality attempt to circumvent the Republican Mother, accepting the reality of
the association of wage work with citizenship that the system of domesticity creates, and
seek to free women to be working citizens on the same terms as men. While those who
advocate for different approaches (involving both public and private actors and
institutions) to supporting and promoting care attempt to reinvent rather than reify the
Republican Mother, trying to find ways to de-gender and to dignify care-giving so that it
does not trap women in the historical subjugation of domesticity.
The sweeping 1996 welfare reforms served as a catalyst for new calls by scholars
and activists, reacting to what they perceived as the mean-spiritedness of the reforms and
the obliviousness to the needs of poor mothers, particularly poor single mothers, for the
public, governmental support of care. New strategies were developed to combat the
prioritizing of work (inadequately supported) over care by the 1996 reforms, which
washed away the old social contract of supporting women as mothers by eliminating Aid
Convention