Social Politics and the Commodification of Care

The capturing of "unpaid work" as a concept has probably been one of the major successes of second-wave feminism. The impact of that idea has been profound, both in analytical and in policy terms. Within policy, the struggle to name and quantify such work has been worldwide, and the campaign to include domestic labor within public accounting has recently become an important issue both in the United States and in the United Nations (Himmelweit, 1995). At national levels too, welfare states and policy makers within them have learned to pay at least lip service to the way in which welfare delivery is dependent on the continuous presence of mothers and other carers within the domestic sphere (see for example, in the British context, Griffiths 1988).