The growing attention to care in feminist ethics and social theory has also focused on the fate of paid care-workers. With the increasing numbers of privileged women in the Global North working outside the home, paid domestic workers, often immigrant women of color, have taken over the performance of house- and care-work. Feminists have observed that care-work is still devalued, as low wages and social exclusion attest. The solution they propose is to increase remuneration for paid care-workers, including granting them more social protection and rights of citizenship. Drawing on Dorothy Roberts’s distinction between menial and spiritual housework, this paper questions if the division between care and other forms of feminized work is justified. In the care-work literature, the difference hinges on the affective element—namely, caring. This elides the historical trajectory Roberts observes: performance of the most mundane, least affective work to lower-status women. I expand on Roberts’s argument to include still-feminized food and clothing production, as it moves from homes into factories, eventually to the Global South. The women who perform this labor are not usually categorized as “care-workers”, but their labor is no less important to human welfare. What is needed is a concept of gendered labor that does not depend on affect, and so can avoid repeating the imposition of the most menial tasks onto the least privileged and most invisible.
