FemResThe Living Review

Care Economy

Explore curated feminist content about Care Economy

042
42 items
06
Connection paths

FemRes guide

Care is the infrastructure we pretend is private

Every society depends on work that sustains bodies and relationships: feeding, cleaning, teaching, nursing, accompanying, listening, repairing and making daily life possible. Yet much of this labor disappears inside households, is treated as women's natural capacity, or is paid poorly precisely because it resembles an obligation of love. The care economy names this entire field—paid and unpaid, formal and informal—and asks why the work most necessary to life is so routinely excluded from accounts of productivity and value.

The problem is not only that women perform more care. Power determines who may evade it. Wealthier households, employers and states can transfer responsibility to wives, grandmothers, migrants and low-paid workers while preserving the fiction of the independent worker and citizen. One woman's entry into professional employment is not collective liberation if another woman absorbs the same work without secure status, time with her own family or ordinary labor rights. A global care chain moves affection, money and exhaustion across borders as well as between rooms.

Redistribution must therefore mean more than persuading individual men to help. Public childcare and long-term care, health systems, paid leave, shorter and predictable working time, adequate income, migration rights and strong conditions for care workers all shape who can give and receive care without depletion. Disability justice adds another demand: care recipients are not passive burdens, and access cannot be designed only by managers or nondisabled professionals. Good care requires time, competence, consent, feedback and shared authority.

Care politics contains difficult tensions. Payment and recognition can challenge invisibility, but market price alone cannot define a relationship's quality. Families and communities can sustain life, but romanticizing them can conceal coercion and unequal labor. Mutual aid can create forms of collective access that institutions refuse, yet celebrating resilience may turn abandonment into an expectation that marginalized people endlessly rescue one another. The central question is not whether care belongs to home, market or state, but how responsibility, resources and decision-making can be organized democratically across all three.

Four questions to carry through the archive

Whose need becomes visible?

Ask who defines good care, whose knowledge counts and whether recipients can shape the conditions of support rather than merely receive it.

Who carries the full cost?

Trace time, wages, health, migration status, emotional labor and lost opportunities—not only the price paid for a service.

Is care redistributed or transferred?

A task moving from a privileged woman to a poorer woman changes the worker without changing men's, employers' or the state's responsibility.

What makes care democratic?

Look for resources, worker power, recipient voice, public accountability and the real ability to refuse, revise or share an arrangement.

Choose a way in

These paths move from the scale of unpaid work to democratic and disability-justice alternatives, then follow care through migration, labor regimes and community survival.

Connection paths

Adjacent topics

Media composition

Read along this issue

42 · Care Economy

Books

View all
01

Books · Sep 2021

Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media

Sarah T. Roberts

Through transnational interviews, Sarah T. Roberts reveals commercial content moderation: the automation and safety visible on platforms rely on secret, quantified, and outsourced human judgment.

02

Books · Aug 2021

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot

Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy

Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy trace how voice assistants, domestic robots, and intimate technologies encode wifework into the future home, then propose a feminist reboot.

03

Books · Sep 2020

Trans Care

Hil Malatino

Hil Malatino reframes care through trans mutual aid, burnout, medical systems, and the unequal labor that holds community together.

04

Books · Oct 2018

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha frames disability justice as practical knowledge from sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown communities, centering collective access, care webs, and liberation where no one is left behind.

05

Books · Jan 2018

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Virginia Eubanks

Investigating welfare, homeless housing, and child protection, Virginia Eubanks shows how automation disguises austerity as neutral efficiency and subjects poor people to continuous surveillance.

06

Books · Mar 2017

Matters of Care

María Puig de la Bellacasa

A feminist reading of María Puig de la Bellacasa’s account of care as maintenance, affect and political obligation - from knowledge-making to permaculture and living soil.

Films

View all

Videos

View all
01

Videos · Oct 2023

Caregiving is real work - let’s treat it that way

Sharmi Surianarain

Starting from billions of daily unpaid-care hours, Sharmi Surianarain argues that employers must design work around care rather than leaving employees to absorb it privately.

02

Videos · Mar 2023

Collective care is the work

Janey Starling & Seyi Falodun-Liburd

Drawing on Black feminist and disability-justice traditions, two Level Up organizers define collective care as movement infrastructure rather than a benefit added after political work.

03

Videos · Dec 2022

Women’s Work: The Care Burden

Tashny Sukumaran

Tashny Sukumaran asks why women’s educational achievement does not translate automatically into equal employment, tracing attrition to care infrastructure, workplace culture, and family expectations.

04

Videos · Jan 2022

Who Cares? The Gendered Burden of Unpaid Care Work

Aina Salleh

Drawing on Malaysia and the wider region, Aina Salleh explains how unpaid care restricts women’s time, income, and public participation, and argues for care as a shared responsibility.

05

Videos · Jan 2020

The Unpaid Work GDP Ignores - and Why It Matters

Marilyn Waring

Economist Marilyn Waring asks why national accounts exclude most unpaid household services from their core production boundary, and why that statistical rule must be distinguished from a judgment about their social value.

06

Videos · Nov 2018

The work that makes all other work possible

Ai-jen Poo

In this TEDWomen talk, Ai-jen Poo frames domestic workers, nannies, caregivers, and cleaners as invisible infrastructure and argues for rights, wages, and dignity.

Podcasts

Articles

View all
01

Articles · Nov 2024

Bridging the gap: How Kenya’s National Care Policy can drive gender equality

UN Women Africa

UN Women uses Kenya’s National Care Policy process to show how time-use evidence can inform childcare, social protection, labor rights, and basic-service reform.

02

Articles · Oct 2024

Unpaid care work prevents 708 million women from participating in the labour market

International Labour Organization

ILO labor-force data identifies unpaid care as a major structural barrier to women’s employment and shows how region, income, and family institutions widen the gap.

03

Articles · Aug 2024

ILO-Magdalene social experiment: Women spend 100 hours of unpaid care work a week

International Labour Organization

An ILO and Magdalene time-use experiment makes Indonesian women’s invisible care hours concrete, showing how family responsibility consumes rest, paid work, and autonomy.

04

Articles · Jun 2024

Unpacking the care society: Caring for people and the planet

UN Women

UN Women defines care as a public good and social infrastructure, connecting gender equality, climate crisis, public services, and care workers’ rights in one policy framework.

05

Articles · Mar 2024

WHO report reveals gender inequalities at the root of global crisis in health and care work

World Health Organization

WHO connects the concentration of women in paid and unpaid care with low wages and underinvestment, showing that the care crisis is a structural result of devaluing women’s work.

06

Articles · Oct 2023

No Care Economies Without Domestic Workers!

AWID and domestic worker, labor and feminist movement contributors

An AWID co-created manifesto argues that a just care economy must recognize domestic workers’ labor rights and leadership, not treat care as an input to economic growth.

Papers

View all
01

Papers · Feb 2024

From wages for housework to self-care: feminist perspectives on the care economy

Anna Moser

Anna Moser places Wages for Housework and the contemporary self-care industry in one political-economic history, showing how capitalism privatizes reproduction and resells individual solutions.

02

Papers · Jan 2019

Gender, migration and care deficits: what role for the sustainable development goals?

Sarah Gammage, Natacha Stevanovic

This article connects women's migration, care deficits, and the Sustainable Development Goals, asking how global policy frameworks can respond to care responsibilities displaced across borders.

03

Papers · Sep 2009

Love and Gold

Arlie Russell Hochschild

Hochschild explains global care chains through the story of a Filipina migrant nanny: wealthy countries receive care while sending communities absorb care drain and emotional displacement.

04

Papers · Sep 2006

Globalization and the Increase in Transnational Care Work: The Flip Side

Jean L. Pyle

Pyle analyzes the growth of transnational care work through globalization and social reproduction, showing how nursing, domestic work, intimate labor, and migration regimes form part of the global economy rather than private arrangements outside it.

05

Papers · Aug 2000

Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Parreñas's classic article makes global care chains concrete through migrant Filipina domestic workers, showing how care crises in middle-class households are displaced onto women from the Global South while creating new care gaps in sending communities.