Acknowledging the reality of need means acknowledging that caregiving is not a niche occupation. Each of us will give and receive care throughout our lives, sometimes in paid positions, sometimes in unpaid ones. Some care will be offered to those we already love and acknowledge a duty toward. Some care is offered to strangers, and it requires a different kind of inducement. Some care may be compensated by payment. At other times, it is compelled simply by compassion for someone who is marked both by their need and by their inability to purchase the care they require.

Whether or not care is waged, when advocates try to make a case for the value of care, they often turn to the language of economics and labor. This rhetorical tool has its uses, but when it’s the primary way of asserting the necessity and the dignity of receiving and offering care, it is too narrow to allow us to speak the full truth. Instead of beginning with the language of money and wages, it is more fruitful to begin with the foundational truth that we live in society in order to receive and offer aid in fulfilling our duties. Wherever a duty of care exists, people have a right to receive support in order to fulfill that duty. Our analysis must begin with our obligations, not our potential advantage.

The shift to market language is most helpful as a way to gesture at the scale of this load-bearing part of our society. If unpaid care work were tallied up at the market rate, Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin estimates, it would make up “a full 20 percent of GNP.” The work of care, primarily done by women, is excluded from economic analysis mainly because of its intimacy. A great deal of labor becomes visible to economists and policymakers only when it is performed for strangers. If two stay-at-home mothers swapped their children and paid each other $30,000 a year for their caregiving, then the economy would appear to grow by $60,000 (and federal and state governments would reap their share of taxes). But if each mother did the exact same work for her own child, the labor would be, on paper, economically worthless. By this logic, it is love, as much as the absence of wages, that renders work economically empty.

Crunching the numbers helps us make care work more visible and comparable to “real” work. The smallness of repeated unremarkable acts (diaper changes, doctor’s appointments, playground visits) acquires weight when the acts are aggregated. At the scale of an individual life or household, care work feels flimsy or invisible. It is often erased almost as soon as it is completed. (Hence, my husband and I frequently tell each other explicitly: “You didn’t see it, but there was a moment this afternoon when the floor was clear.”) The language of economics offers a way to integrate tiny slices of a full life into a visible whole. It resembles the first introductions to mathematical integrations I saw in high school calculus, where infinitesimally thin trapezoids, each essentially amounting to nothing, can sum to the area under the curve of the equation you’re exploring.

I’m grateful for these forms of summation, which can spark a conversation, but I don’t think they can sustain one. The language of economics is attractive because it buys the speaker something else. Turning to the language of wages and GDP can lend weightiness to the work, but it also borrows (perhaps without intending to) the assumptions of the workplace and the relationship between employer and labor. When it makes sense for money to change hands, it’s still important that the money isn’t viewed as fully buying off the relational complexity of giving and receiving care. But frequently wages are regarded as sanitizing – once one person is the purchaser, they can’t be needy, no matter how profound their physical need.

Moving work out of the informal economy and into the formal, waged economy changes the relationship between the two people contracting. And for many buyers, the distancing effect is well worth paying a premium. In a conversation I hosted on my Other Feminisms Substack, I was interested in how birth became more private and professionalized. I’m grateful for medical advances – both my girls might not have survived delivery without the help of serious, hospital-only interventions. But I missed the sense that birth might be something shared with friends and community. In my ideal, doctors would be able to swoop in for an emergency, but I would labor in a livelier, less sterile environment when things were going well. I was a little envious of the women in Kristin Lavransdatter, who attended each other’s layings-in. While the first labors I witnessed were my own, the women of Kristin’s fourteenth-century Norway saw a wide variety of deliveries from a young age. They were on hand to assist in labor, and they sang, prayed, and changed linens alongside the people they loved.

For one of the Other Feminisms commenters, this sounded overwhelming. She wrote:

Intellectually I can understand the strengthening of bonds that being present at each other’s births must have been for the women in a community. You share each other’s daily lives, you share chores, you share the perilous, momentous moments of birth with each other. All the same, I would not have wanted a woman I know to be present at the birth of my children, far too personal, icky, and messy and I would be in their debt forever. Thank God for paid professionals, you can walk away and don’t have to reciprocate.

She did an excellent job distilling what pricing and professionalizing are supposed to buy us. When you ask for help from a friend or a relative, the help you receive deepens your relationship. You may feel you owe them a favor – a meal when they’re the one sick, a witness when they are the one in labor. But more than that, as my commenter observed, you have been intimately and vulnerably seen by them, and that disclosure of weaknesses colors your friendship.

The question is whether you see that weakness as continuous with your identity as a friend or as a jarring aberration. Seeking out a professional in times of illness or dependence helps silo off a time of sickness from the position of strength you imagine constitutes your “normal” life. And the fact that you are the payer restores your upper hand, even from a sickbed. Your infirmity might make you dependent on a nurse, but your purchasing power makes the skilled care worker dependent on you. You meet as strangers, and you are free to part as strangers, held at a remove by wages.

However, it would be more accurate to say that what the money buys is a promise to behave as strangers, professionals. Need creates intimacy, and money can’t erase that bond; it can only be a contract to camouflage it. The intimacy of care makes both workers and employers vulnerable to each other. Intimate work of this kind doesn’t fit naturally into the market language of interchangeable buyers and sellers. A buyer of care will find that they cannot easily switch to a new, cheaper caregiver who does “equivalent” work because the new caregiver lacks a history with the person in need of care. There is no premium a parent can pay to fill in that prior personal connection. And a caregiver can’t easily withhold their labor, in the way a factory worker might. It’s one thing to the stop the production line rolling and to limit the supply of car parts. It’s another to leave a baby alone, crying out for milk, or an elderly person unsupervised, in danger of wandering away from home.

The radial network of need doesn’t match the balanced reciprocality of market logic. A baby cannot pay back the time and attention he needs from his mother; a mother does not need to earn or recompense the care she receives from others. Instead of clean-cut transactions, there is a circulatory system of care and need, where each gives to the one they can reach, and receives from the person who cares for them, without concern for balancing the books.

For a family navigating their present options, the question of how to approach a market for care labor justly is complicated. Almost no family (or individual) can sustain itself, so the question is what mix of waged and unwaged help it will rely on. From Ezra Klein’s point of view, richer families maintain the illusion of a stable, disconnected nuclear family by relying on paid staff to cover the support that historically was offered by extended family. As Klein put it, “We have this ideal, … it creates stresses and expectations that are unrealistic. And richer people buy their way out of it…. Richer people basically buy extended family. They buy child care. They buy cleaning. They buy, to some degree, even friendship and activity.”

The market offers real conveniences. I more often rely on babysitters booked through a website than I participate in the baby-sitting co-op organized by mothers in my neighborhood. It gives me much more flexibility to pay a stranger with money than to owe another mother my time. Paying her back may require me to cancel other plans. The specialization of services and market makers means that families (even middle-class ones) who might have once employed a live-in servant now rely on a carousel of gig workers. These relationships are more glancing by design.

Wealthy countries and middle-class families don’t want to give up the real goods of wealth and industrialization. But there’s a lingering question: How can family time break away from the pace set by a market logic? How do you turn off the running meter in your head? When families work hard to optimize their parenting time, they can easily wind up missing out on the most rewarding parts. The problem is that just because you can speed up or outsource parts of parenting doesn’t mean you or your child wants to. As Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek write in After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, “It might be clear that the mining of natural resources should take a minimum of human activity, for instance, but the same does not hold for the labor involved in raising a child.”

The point of increasing efficiency at work is to have the spaciousness for leisure and presence at home. Care work is part of what we want free time for, especially so we can approach it in an unhurried, present way. But the speed-up attitude can make it hard to choose where to be slow and deliberate. As Hester and Srnicek see it, parents can feel tempted to streamline away the best parts of their “job” at home: “Somewhat perversely, the more enjoyable aspects of childcare – engaging, playing, interacting with children – have been automated via screens, while the more routine and burdensome aspects have remained largely untouched…. We use domestic technologies for our children’s entertainment, education, and enrichment, so that we can cook their dinners and organize their PE kits. Surely it should be the other way around.”

Whichever parts of work can be alienated are the ones it is most tempting to delegate to a screen or a servant. But this neglects the question of how performing the work changes the worker. When time feels scarce, I have to ask which parts of my work as a parent I can most easily shrug off or entrust to someone else. But if time were abundant, I’d ask a different question: Which parts of the time we spend together do the most to shape me as a mother and help my children grow into maturity?

Framed this way, my time with my children is amateurish in the classical sense. It’s work undertaken for the love of the process as much as for the sake of a final product A great deal of the work that parents or other caregivers do is intended to be invisible. A clean home doesn’t draw attention to the act of sweeping. Alanna Okun noticed this pattern shaping her approach to her programming work as well as her housework. As she gained mastery, she began learning to refactor code – refactoring being the process of rewriting code that already technically works to work better. From the user’s point of view, nothing should change. The same inputs continue to produce the same outputs, but after refactoring, the code doing the work is tidier, more elegant, a better foundation for the new thing you’d like to add. It was personally satisfying to Okun, but she noticed it was a little hard to share her joy. “The idea is that you’re tinkering under the hood in a way that anyone other than you will ideally never notice,” she wrote. “Kind of antithetical to making things in the first place, right?”

Refactoring involves at least a secret creativity, the knowledge that by going under the hood I’ve added an elegance or stability that no one else will see. It’s a little like the signature of the builder found within the wall of a house during renovations – a private moment shared with one’s creation. But a great deal of housework and care work is experienced as drudgery – as Simone de Beauvoir expressed with particular verve: “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present.”

Conservation, in Beauvoir’s estimation, is soul-crushing. Women who can avoid or outsource that work win a measure of freedom. But when they hire another to cover this work, something of that embarrassment or contempt for the work itself carries over to their relationship with the drudges and drones they’ve hired to serve in their places. If the work of maintenance, cleaning, and care is agreed to be at least a little degrading, then it’s a kindness for employer and employee to see each other as little as possible. Invisibility minimizes the pain of being seen doing such disreputable work. In each place that labor is routinely outsourced, to a machine or a domestic worker, it’s a little easier to see it as unrelated to the main work of being human. If a robot (or a lower-class worker) can do it, it must not be as important to what makes a sophisticated person real.

The question is in what spirit to approach maintenance and care work so that it does unite the intellect and the body, rather than making us feel like we are only using a part of ourselves and leaving the rest to atrophy. There’s an alternative way to frame the constant, faithful drumbeat of care for home and for persons. For G. K. Chesterton, there is always something romantic about maintenance – about keeping something still in a swirling storm of entropy.

If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution…. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.

While I sometimes share Beauvoir’s sense of conservation as Sisyphean and stultifying, thinking of Chesterton lends a more stalwart set to my shoulders as I pick up the living room or start dicing onions for dinner. Resisting entropy in Chesterton’s romantic mood feels more like being the last soldier remaining to defend a narrow pass, facing an endless line of opponents but holding on for just one more blow, then another, then another…

There’s a romance to the solitary stubborn figure, but it’s not the best model for sharing care (especially within a marriage). Some maintenance work requires the lonely work of the lighthouse keeper, but if you think of care and housework as a matter of beating the bounds – keeping the world in order on regular patrol – that kind of work was often done communally. It was important for the entire parish or town to occasionally beat the bounds in a festive spirit, walking and knowing the limits of what they stewarded.

Wages and financial support matter, but when they can’t fully express the value of certain kinds of service and care work, what other ways are there to give this work its due weight? A number of female artists have attempted to limn this work with prestige by incorporating it into performance art. In one of my favorite pieces, Touch Sanitation Performance, Mierle Laderman Ukeles spent a year meeting and thanking each of New York City’s 8,500 sanitation workers. She offered a handshake to each worker she met, and she walked alongside them as they worked, covering full shifts. The best way to recognize the magnitude of this hidden work was with the duration of time it took to thank each individual. Spanning 1979 to 1980, Ukules’s work was a sort of pilgrimage.

Elevating maintenance as art allows us to see it as an expression both of mastery and of stewardship. To restore order takes an attentiveness to the material world; a sanitation worker doesn’t see generic garbage but has to be attentive to each bit of refuse as individual to determine what its future should be. Even when the sorting is done by machine, the factory line relies on the particular material properties of individual bits of detritus – metal recycling is hoovered up by magnets, light plastic bags are puffed by little jets of air over a gap into which heavier materials fall. Each type of refuse is carefully separated to see what new thing can be made.

Showing the value of care work similarly relies on shifting from viewing care work as an undifferentiated mass to individual moments, which agglomerate to a massive whole. In Sarah Maple’s 2022 Labour of Love she filled a room with 650 visual depictions of her nursing her baby – one for each nursing session over her baby’s first three months. Given room to sprawl, the ordinary work of mothering becomes monumental.

Valuing care work requires practice seeing at different scales. Care and maintenance work happens at a relational scale, often in the privacy of the home. It is sustained presence and faithfulness in small things. It can be hard to grapple with the cost of care or the needs of care workers, paid or unpaid, without a way of agglomerating their work into something visible and big – a massive GDP figure, a graphical representation of sleepless nights, the long pilgrimage of handshakes. But the reason to shift to the macro view is to restore our attentiveness to the micro – to treat each individual, relational care relationship as real.

Compensation for workers and social safety nets for families are necessary, but purely economic solutions and rhetoric will sell short the intense vulnerability, intimacy, and particularity of care. Care will never be standardized, widgetized, or fully “professionalized” in the language of the market. To treat those in need of care and caregivers with respect means judging them by the standard of their own form of work, not asking them to hide the parts of their work that don’t fit a contractual model. For employers or buyers of care, it also means acknowledging and embracing the relational nature of care – being present to the people who care for you, your loved ones, or your home, and realizing that exposing your own need means being exposed to theirs. Vulnerability cannot be solved; it can only be shared.

Excerpted from The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto by Leah Libresco Sargeant (University of Notre Dame Press, October, 2025). Used by permission.