EXTENDED REVIEW Gender, care and emotions Susan Himmelweit Diemut Elisabet Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, £30.00, viii+281 pp. Jean Gardiner, Gender, Care and Economics , London: Macmillan, 1997, £42.50, paper £15.99, xiv+273 pp. Care and its failure to be recognised in mainstream economic and political discourse is a topical issue these days. Critiques of accepted thinking based on the need to consider care have been developed in a number of disciplines. Care also raises a policy agenda. Does the growth of market forces and policies designed to allow contractual freedom and the unfettered pursuit of self-interest result in a squeezing out of care? A number of political movements, notably feminism and environmentalism, criticise current policies for androcentrism and short- sightedness in not recognising that care, for both other people and the planet, is as important to our future as economic growth. In raising such questions, an ethic of care has been counterposed to more familiar individualist or libertarian guiding principles. These two books are therefore timely, particularly because they do more than just repeat such critiques but attempt to build alternative perspectives in which care figures centrally. The authors come from different disciplines – Jean Gardiner is an economist while Diemut Bubeck is a political theorist – so they engage with different issues. Both books start by considering the domestic labour debate, the attempt by Marxist feminists in the 1970s to provide a materialist account of women’s oppression based on their gendered responsibility for domestic work. The authors come to similar conclusions, both finding the Marxist starting point useful but refusing to be hide-bound by its limitations. In particular both reject the idea that all domestic labour does is to reproduce either a capitalist or a patriarchal system of exploitation. However, from there they move on to different questions. Bubeck remains focused on the question of exploitation in the quantitative materialist sense of whether particular workers are performing more labour than the amount necessary for their own reproduction. Her aim is to explain how in this sense women as carers are exploited even if they are not forced but choose to care. In this her work is a significant advance on previous materialist theories of women’s exploitation, such as that of Delphy and Leonard (1992), that imply that women are forced into their exploited position. However, the weakness in Bubeck’s argument is that the psychological and ethical factors which make carers vulnerable to exploitation seem added on rather than intrinsic to the notion of care she uses. Perhaps surprisingly given their backgrounds, it is Bubeck who insists on taking a materialist perspective on care, and her interpretation of this proves rather limiting, while Gardiner, by using both the emotional and personal nature of care to differentiate it from other forms of work, offers a more promising approach. Bubeck defines care as face-to-face activity to meet needs that another person cannot meet for herself. Meeting needs that people can equally well provide for Work, Employment & Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 551–553 September 1998 http:/www.cambridge.org/core/product/7A849170939516EC7E09F236F9768B5F terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 06 Dec 2016 at 08:58:41, subject to the Cambridge Core