'Columbia University Libraries/Information Services'
Doi
Abstract
This lecture looks back to Eleanor Rathbone's thinking about the roots of gender inequality. Women's disadvantage, she argued, stemmed almost entirely from society's unwillingness to value, economically and morally, the work of care -- work that is typically done by women. It then turns to the course of social policy in recent decades, showing how the Anglo-American drive to prioritize wage-earning while still neglecting the problem of care has left women and children still disproportionately poor. It then looks at three main proposals offered to compensate better for the work of care and thus to combat women carers' systematic disadvantage. It concludes by challenging our tendency to identify market-rationality with morality, and points to Rathbone's own commitment to Kantian principles as a better moral framework
