Our nation’s patchwork system of early care and education arose, in large part, in response to mothers entering the workforce. That shift reshaped the American family, and over the years it has fueled cultural debates over marriage, gender roles and who should care for young children.
In her recent book “Motherhood Discounted: Care Work in America Before and After Roe,” Carolyn McConnell dissects the concept of “traditional marriage,” which she calls an “anomalous, brief historical phenomenon.” She writes: “That modern creation, the self-sufficient nuclear family, was at mid-twentieth century ascendant — just in time to show its cracks and fragility as well as the price paid to maintain it.”
“That price,” she adds, “would be paid by women.”
McConnell, a lawyer and activist, examines America’s long history of extracting labor from women and mothers cheaply, and how that’s led society to view caring for children as an unpaid responsibility or marital duty.
McConnell’s book challenges the American ideal of individual autonomy — or the belief that independence and self-reliance are inherently good and dependence inherently bad — and asks why a society so reliant on care work offers so little support for it.
The book expertly weaves together historical, cultural and policy threads that constitute the state of motherhood and childcare. McConnell unearths an array of moments in American history, some startling and dispiriting, that have led to societal devaluation of care work and the exploitation of mothers.
She explains, for example, that in the mid-19th century, when the “common school” arose — which she describes as a precursor to today’s public school system — more teachers were needed and women were looked at as a solution. She surfaces a quote written by the Littleton, Massachusetts, School Committee in 1849: “God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind, and it seems … very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month, for teaching children the ABCs, when a female could do the work more successfully at one-third of the price.”
She also describes how in 1939, the U.S. Board of Tax Appeals determined that childcare expenses were not deductible as work-related expenses, refusing to classify them as anything “other than a personal concern.”
Through archival excavation and portrayals of care providers’ lives and fates, McConnell highlights the many ways that law and policy have consistently undervalued their contributions. In the conversation below, McConnell discusses how “the myth of autonomy” has shaped American culture and policy as it relates to care, how we got here and why change is needed.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you decide to write this book?
I experienced motherhood as wonderful and remarkable but also quite unfair. And it seemed a lot harder than it had to be. I was enough of a feminist that I figured it wasn’t just a me problem. And that’s where this book came from — me trying to make sense of my own experience when I became a mother and finding that one’s identity as an employee and as a mother are mutually exclusive. As a worker, you’re expected to be available at any and all hours for work, and as a mother, you’re expected to be available at any and all hours for parenting. This creates a conflict that our society most certainly has not solved.
… One of the ways this once was dealt with was domesticity and the separation and the expectation that men would be wage earners for the family and women would specialize in care work. That of course has fallen apart for nearly all Americans because there are very few jobs that pay enough to support a whole family. So everybody in the family has to go to work and that’s creating even more conflict because families are finding there just simply isn’t enough time or money to support their families.
A central theme of your book is that America’s emphasis on individualism revolves around the false idea that independence is a good thing and dependence is a bad thing. You draw from Martha Albertson Fineman, who coined the term “autonomy myth,” and explored the idea in her book. How does your experience with motherhood relate to the myth of autonomy?
The real function of the “autonomy myth” is to devalue care and erase it. The autonomy myth is the idea that the natural state for a person is to be an independent, self-sufficient grown-up, but of course that state … arises only through massive amounts of care work. … But if you assume that a grown-up human being is the natural state of things, you’ve erased all that work and therefore you’ve turned care workers from creditors — as I think they rightly are — to debtors and we owe them nothing, because nothing they do has any value.
What are the real-world ramifications of the economic structures that we have inherited?
There’s both waged care work and unwaged, and we often think of those very separately, but they’re actually really just parts of one whole. The fact that so much care work is done without pay is one reason you can pay people less when you do pay for it and the status of it is low. In this country and all over the world, a very large fraction of the low-wage care work is done by immigrants. I think that leads to an explanation about some of our politics currently … because immigrants have become a convenient target for what I think is a legitimate rage that people have at the lack of social support for care work.
Why do policymakers make it so hard to secure public benefits for care?
In this country, we love to do these very indirect incentives that maybe somewhere down the line will help get care work supported. If any parent who’s tried to get the tax benefit for childcare knows, it’s a pittance and you have to do a lot of paperwork. It’s maddening, and that’s a pattern that you see throughout our policies for the dependent care allowances that are provided through people’s employment. And of course healthcare spending accounts — all of that — it always involves this very indirect trying to incentivize it, but also of course, make sure that nobody who doesn’t deserve it gets it. We spend all this money, honestly, to have all these checks on making sure that people don’t get something they don’t deserve. And my belief … is that we need to be providing directly for human needs.
What are the roots of the expectation that men would be wage earners for the family and women would specialize in care work?
America pioneered universal public education, [but] we did it on the cheap by getting women to do it. Before the mid-19th century, most teachers were men. But then when they actually started making universal primary schools, they needed a whole lot more teachers, and they didn’t want to pay for it. … It was like, “Wow, we can pay women a third of what a man makes, and we won’t have to raise taxes so much.” That explains a lot about the status and state of education in this country.
The book’s subtitle, “Care Work in America Before and After Roe,” explicitly ties childcare to reproductive rights. What happens when we make that connection?
The first step in getting care work extracted at a discount is by forcing women to do that first step of biological reproduction, providing the care work of gestating and birthing babies. If you have no choice about whether you will birth a baby, that is the first step of coercing you into providing care. That is actually one of the things that, in a perverse sort of way, provides some hope in this awful moment. I think for all the years that Roe v. Wade stood, we were all of course necessarily defending it. … But Roe actually wasn’t particularly useful as a way of defending reproductive freedom. It was framed as a very limited choice, [and] immediately after Roe was decided, the right [to abortion] was chipped away. … So what we have, now that Roe is gone, is an opportunity to fight for what we actually need, which is the right to get abortions, the right to healthcare, reproductive healthcare, and all forms of healthcare as a seamless connected whole, right? The right to choose whether to be a mother. It’s all one thing. The basic underlying point of this book is to engage in a revaluation of care. We all are familiar with care work. We all have received it, and most of us will give it. To value that is a really important political act.