Remaking Economic Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: Women’s Movement Claims and the ‘Commodification of Elderly Care’

Abstract

It is widely assumed that one of the most visible legacies of the second wave women’s movement has been a radical transformation of expectations regarding the gender division of employment and, to a lesser extent, unpaid care activities. However, some recent feminist research has stressed the unintended consequences of the claims made in the final decades of the twentieth century for women’s ‘emancipation through employment’ under what has sometimes been called the ‘paid work paradigm’ for gender equality (Méda and Périvier, 2007; Lewis 2003, 2007). In European policy terms, there are now quite clear signs of a shift from measures predicated on women’s widespread exclusion from the labour market to policies explicitly aimed at encouraging their continuous employment over the life-course (Jenson, 2008, 2009). However, this shift has been received with ambivalence in feminist circles, notably due to its potentially divisive effects on women as a social group and to its ineffectiveness in transforming the gender division of (paid and unpaid) care activities more generally. Despite the partial shift ‘from private to public reproduction’¹ (Hernes, 1987), the main burden of care activities continues to fall principally on women’s shoulders (Bambra, 2007), but not necessarily equally on women of different social and racial origins, and not necessarily to the same extent in all national contexts.