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Abstract
Care work is done in the home as well as in markets for pay. Five theoretical frameworks have been developed to conceptualize care work; the frameworks sometimes offer competing answers to the same questions, and other times address distinct questions. The "devaluation" perspective argues that care work is badly rewarded because care is associated with women, and often women of color. The "public good" framework points out that care work provides benefits far beyond those to the direct recipient and suggests that the low pay of care work is a special case of the failure of markets to reward public goods. The "prisoner of love" framework argues that the intrinsic caring motives of care workers allow employers to more easily get away with paying care workers less. Instead of seeing the emotional satisfactions of giving care as its own reward, the "commodification of emotion" framework focuses on emotional harm to workers when they have to sell services that use an intimate part of themselves. The "love and money" framework argues against dichotomous views in which markets are seen as antithetical to true care.
Key Words gender, motherhood, work, inequality, feminism
INTRODUCTION
Some jobs involve providing care for pay; child care providers, teachers, nurses, doctors, and therapists all provide care. Some care is provided without pay; for example, parents rear their children and adults care for their disabled kin. This review surveys emerging scholarship on paid and unpaid care work. Most of it comes from gender scholars. They take an interest because women do such a high proportion of paid and unpaid care work, so that how well a society rewards care work impacts gender inequality. But gender arrangements also affect how care is provided; increasing women's employment means that more of the care of children and disabled elders is provided by paid workers rather than unpaid female family members.
I review both empirical and theoretical work, but organize my discussion around five conceptual frameworks deployed in the literature. I evaluate their logic as well as how well they fit available empirical evidence. In some cases, these frameworks offer different (competing or complementary) answers to the same questions. In other cases, they address distinct questions. The "devaluation" framework emphasizes that cultural biases limit both...