ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD

The Culture of Politics:

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Traditional, Postmodern,
Cold-modern, and Warm-
modern Ideals of Care

Among the visual images of care in the modern Western world,

a classic view portrays a mother holding a child. Frequently, the mother
is seated in a chair at home or in a dreamlike setting, such as her gar-
den. Often found in old-fashioned birthday cards and ads for yarn in
women's magazines, the image is a secular, middle-class version of
Madonna and Child. The caregiver in these images is a woman, not a
man. She is at home, not in a public place. Moreover, the caregiving
seems natural, effortless. She is sitting, quiescent, not standing or mov-
ing—stances associated with "working." She seems to enjoy caring for
the child and, as the child's face often suggests, she is good at caring.
Thus, the image of care is linked with things feminine, private, natu-
ral, and well-functioning: this represents an ideal of care.
Drawn from nineteenth-century, upper middle-class parlor life, this
image has been put to extensive commercial use. Corporate advertis-
ers often juxtapose the mother-and-child image with such products as
health insurance, telephone service, Band-Aids, diapers, talcum pow-
der, and a wide variety of foods.1 Our constant exposure to the com-
mercial image of mother puts us at one remove from it. In a parallel
way, the very term "care," at least in the American context, has suf-

Social Politics Fall 1995

O 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
332 • Hochschild

fered from commercial over-use, associated as it is with orange juice,

milk, frozen pizza, and microwave ovens. Thus, both the image and
word for care have come to seem not only feminine, private, and nat-
ural but also emotionally void, bland, dull, even "sappy."
In the small but growing feminist literature on care, scholars have
begun to challenge the silence on the issue in much conventional so-
cial theory. Such writers as Trudy Knijn, Clare Ungerson, and Kari

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Waemess note that care is more central in the lives of women than men,
since it is more often women who care for children, the sick, and the
elderly. While early feminist scholarship focused on the exploitative
nature of women's traditional roles, recent feminist writers, as Kari
Waerness puts it, "have struggled to redefine the possible grounds of
feminist theory" (1987, 229). The quest for new "cultural grounds"
coincides with a dilemma that many modern women face (Holter 1984;
Waerness 1984; Sassoon 1987; Ungerson 1990; Knijn 1987). Waerness
notes that "Women . . . are faced both with the task of caring for chil-
dren, the ill, the disabled, and the elderly in the private sphere, while
at the same time trying to achieve more command over their own lives
and a greater measure of economic independence" (1987, 208).
In this essay, I hope to add to this discussion, first, by describing a
growing crisis in care, and second, by analyzing the cultural frameworks
through which we see "care." I suggest that recent trends in the Unit-
ed States have expanded the need for care while contracting the sup-
ply of it. This has created a "care deficit" in both private and public
life. In private life, the care deficit is most palpable in families where
working mothers, married and single, lack sufficient help from part-
ners or kin. (Here I draw illustrations from my research on tensions in
American two-job marriages reported in The Second Shift [1989].) In
public life, the care deficit can be seen in government cuts in funds for
services to poor mothers, the disabled, mentally ill, and the elderly. In
reducing the financial deficit, legislators add to the "care deficit."
Those on all sides of the care debate use terms and think in images
that reflect four models of care.2 These cultural models set down the
basic terms of political debate about care and so deserve a closer look.
The first is the traditional model represented by the image of the home-
maker mother. The second is the postmodern model, represented by
the working mother who "does it all" with no additional help from
any quarter and no adaptation in her work schedule. This image often
goes along with a tacit lowering of standards of care, as well as mak-
ing those lower standards seem normal. The third is the cold-modern
model represented by impersonal institutional care in year-round ten-
hour day care and old-age homes. The fourth is the warm-modern
model in which institutions provide some care of the young and elder-
ly, while women and men join equally in providing private care as well.
 Ideals of Care • 333

Each model implies a definition of care, an idea about who gives it, and
how much of what kind of care is "good enough."

Two Sides of the Care Deficit

First, by the term "care" I refer to an emotional bond, usually mu-
tual, between the caregiver and cared-for, a bond in which the care-

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giver feels responsible for others' well-being and does mental, emotion-
al, and physical work in the course of fulfilling that responsibility. Thus,
care of a person implies care about him or her. In this essay, I focus on
the care of the very young and old—care we often still think of as "fa-
milial" (Abel and Nelson 1990).
Most care requires work so personal, so involved with feeling, that
we rarely imagine it to be work. But it would be naive to assume that
giving care is completely "natural" or effortless. Care is a result of many
small subtle acts, conscious or not (Ruddick 1989). For example, con-
sider a typical case of an elderly woman who becomes sick and despon-
dent. A middle-aged daughter visits. She helps her mother acknowledge
her illness ("It's worth seeing a doctor") and drives her to the doctor.
She lifts her mother's spirits through humor and conversation: she
"cheers her up." She hugs her mother, makes her chicken soup, deci-
phers the intricate insurance forms, pays the doctor, has extra talks with
the doctor, buys medicine, and offers long-term care at home. These
are some of the many ways to care. In the course of performing these
acts, all the moments when we are also trying to get into the task in
the right spirit, with the appropriate feeling, can be considered the
emotional work of care (Hochschild 1983; Smith 1988). Thus, we put
more than "nature" into caring; we put feeling, acting, thought, and
time into it.
As the worldwide income gap has widened over the last forty years
between the developed and the underdeveloped countries (the oil-rich
and the Pacific Rim countries aside), the need for care has expanded
in much of the developing world, especially Africa and parts of South
America. In this essay, I focus on the United States, a country that has
grown relatively richer during this period. Within this declining "core"
of capitalism, the class gap has widened, and the care of many depen-
dents seems to have eroded, too. Further research may uncover rough
parallels between the American case and that of the countries of West-
ern Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. 3 Perhaps
these models can sensitize us to the often hidden cultural lining beneath
the politics of care in the United States as well as elsewhere in the de-
veloped world.
With the exception of Japan, similar conditions seem to prevail in
other developed countries: a flight of capital to cheap labor pools in
334 • Hochschild

the developing world, the disappearance of well-paid industrial jobs

and the rise of poorly paid service jobs, the weakening of labor unions,
and the influx of migrant workers, all of which put a squeeze on aver-
age blue-collar workers. In addition, the economic recession of the
1980s and cost cutting due to global competition in the 1990s have led
to stagnation in the middle class and decline among the poor.
Two additional shifts have affected this growing need and demand

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for care—changes in the structure of families and at work. In Ameri-
can families over the past forty years, birth rates have fallen, reducing
the demand for care. In the United States, as in Canada, Japan, and
the Netherlands, the average number of children born to women (if they
lived to the end of their childbearing years) was slightly above 3.0 in
1951 and below 1.9 in 1988.4 At the same time, the proportions of eld-
erly and single-parent families as well as unwed mothers rose, increas-
ing the need for care.5 From 1950 to 1990, the proportion of older peo-
ple (65 and over) in the population rose from 8 to 12 percent.
In most of the advanced industrial world, the divorce rate has also
increased. Half of American marriages end in divorce.6 Often we imag-
ine the single parent to be in a temporary phase before remarriage, but
of divorced American women with children, one-third never remarry,
and of the two-thirds who do remarry, over half divorce again.
The divorce rate has increased the number of single-parent families.
In the United States, of all households with children, the proportion
of single-parent homes rose from 9 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in
1988.7 Since the remarriage rate for women is lower than that for men
(because men tend to remarry younger women), and since divorced
women are far more likely to gain custody of children, most single
parents are women. Divorced men provide relatively less care for their
children, and divorced women much more. The rising divorce rate thus
creates a care gap.
Further, throughout the developed world with the exception of Ja-
pan, the proportion of all births that occur to unmarried women has
risen. For example, in the United States the rate rose from 5 percent
in 1960 to 23 percent in 1986 (Sorrentino 1990, 44).8 Most unwed
mothers cohabit with the fathers of their children, but the rate of
breakup among cohabiting couples is higher than among married
couples.9 Thus, the single-parent home is the major source of care for
many children.
The growing fragility of bonds between women and men has also
weakened bonds between men and their children. After divorce, not
only are fathers physically absent, but they reduce contact with their
children and, over time, give them less money (Arendell 1986; Weitz-
man 1985). A national study found that, three years after divorce, half
of American divorced fathers had not visited their children during the
 Ideals of Care • 335

entire previous year and thus did not perform the most basic form of
care (Furstenburg and Cherlin 1991; Wallerstein 1989).10 After one
year, half of divorced fathers were providing no child support at all,
and most of the other half paid irregularly or less than the court-des-
ignated amounts (Arendell 1986). Wealthy divorced fathers were just
as likely to be negligent as poor ones. Thus, recent trends in the class
structure, certain demographic shifts, and family decline have all in-

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creased the need for care.

The Supply Side of the Care Deficit

As the need for public services has increased, however, American
voters have come to favor reducing the supply of care that government
provides, and many favor turning to the beleaguered family as a main
source of care. They fall back on the image of Madonna and child. De-
spite signs of distress and lower well-being among the growing num-
ber of poor children (declining academic performance and high rates
of substance abuse, depression, and teen suicide), much of the Ameri-
can middle class responds with "sympathy fatigue," for some of their
children are in trouble, too.
While the number of homeless and destitute people rose under the
presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, government servic-
es remained static or fell. Both presidents tried to resolve the gap be-
tween demand and supply of care by a cultural move—privatizing our
idea of care. President Bush cut the national budget for school lunches
and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), calling instead
for volunteers who might model themselves on his nonworking wife,
Barbara. In this way, Bush extended a collective, yet private, version
of mother and child over a growing array of social ills.
Even under the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton,
the middle-class "sympathy fatigue" has persisted and grown. For
example, the Personal Responsibility Act, introduced in January 1995
by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, calls for permanent cuts in
welfare to unwed mothers under age eighteen, to anyone who has re-
ceived aid for sixty months, or to anyone who bears a child while on
welfare.
If the state refuses to provide a public solution to the care gap by
funding service programs, can the private realm now really serve as the
main source of care? Like women in most of the developed world,
American women have gone into paid work in extraordinary numbers.
In 1960, 28 percent of married women with children under eighteen
were in the labor force; by 1992, 68 percent of those mothers were
working. More mothers than nonmothers now work. In 1948,11 per-
cent of married women with children aged six and younger worked
336 • Hochschild

outside the home. In 1991,60 percent did. Today over half of all moth-
ers of children one year and younger are in the labor force.
Working mothers are also working longer hours than they were
twenty years ago. In The Overworked American, Juliet Schor argues
that Americans are working "an extra month" each year compared to
twenty years ago. They take shorter vacations, have fewer paid or even
unpaid days off, and work longer hours. According to a 1992 nation-

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al survey, the average worker spends 45 hours a week on the job, in-
cluding overtime and commuting time (Schor 1991; Galinsky, Bond,
and Friedman 1993).
In truth, the private realm to which conservatives turn for a solu-
tion to the care deficit has many problems itself. Many in need of care
are caught between the hardened sensibility of a taxable middle class
coping with a recession and government cuts, on the one hand, and
fewer helping hands because of over-stretched kin networks, on the
other.

Care at Home: "Who Will Do What Mother Did?"

Working mothers face the daunting task of balancing work and fam-
ily life, often in the absence of two things—partners who share work
at home and a workplace that offers both parents flexible hours. Such
women are caught in what I have called a "stalled gender revolution."
It is a revolution because in two decades women have gone from be-
ing mainly at home to being mainly at work. It is "stalled" because
women have undergone this change in a culture that has neither rewired
its notion of manhood to facilitate male work-sharing at home, nor
restructured the workplace so as to allow more control over and flex-
ibility at work.
Caught in this stall, women have little time to care for their children
and elderly parents, much less a sick neighbor. Few can find time to
volunteer at a homeless shelter three times a week. The private "sup-
ply" with which conservatives would answer the growing needs for care
is often made up of women caught in this stalled revolution.
Several points from my recent study reported in the Second Shift are
relevant here. The study was based on in-depth interviews of 50 two-
job couples (who have children six years or younger) and their care-
providers in the San Francisco Bay area. I also observed a dozen fam-
ilies in their homes, following workers from home to workplace and
back (Hochschild 1989). n First, many couples were struggling over
who did how much of the "caring" for the home and children. Care
for the home was a tension point in their marriage. Frequently, the
couple disagreed about how much care each should provide and in what
spirit. Often, too, they disagreed about how much each was actually
 Ideals of Care • 337

doing. And they disagreed over how much really needed to be done.
Men who fully shared the "second shift" often wished their wives were
more grateful to them for being such unusually helpful husbands, es-
pecially when they got no praise from the outside world for doing
housework. Wives who cut back their work hours to contribute more
at home wanted their husbands to appreciate the sacrifices they were
making at work. On both sides, hurt feelings over insufficient gratitude

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were rooted, I argue, in the low value placed on the caregiving work
"mother used to do."
Of the husbands I interviewed, one out of five fully shared the care
of children and home with their working wives. Of the 80 percent of
husbands who did not share—but offered "help" with chores and child
care—over half had felt pressure from their wives to do more, but most
resisted. Some working-class mothers pressed their husbands by indi-
rect means. They got sick or played helpless at paying bills, shopping,
and even cooking and sewing, because, as one wife stated with a wink,
"My husband does it so much better." Other women, with traditional
viewpoints and working-class backgrounds, became "supermoms" in
cycles. They worked hard at the office, raced home to do the chores,
went without resting for weeks on end, then collapsed. When they "fell
sick" or dropped with exhaustion, their working-class husbands—who
otherwise resisted sharing the work at home—took over the cooking
and child care. Sometimes women got pneumonia, migraine headaches,
a bad cold, or flu. When they recovered, their husbands withdrew and
they began the cycle all over again.
Other working mothers used direct means—dramatic confrontations
or serious discussions. Met with intransigence, some wives staged "shar-
ing showdowns." They went on "strike." They refused to cook, and
they let the laundry pile up. One mother even left a child waiting to be
picked up at school, when she knew her husband had forgotten. An-
other started charging her husband by the hour for work at home be-
yond her rightful half. In these ways, wives tried to force their husbands
to do more but often failed to do so. Neither could afford the emotional
"luxury" of a marriage free of a struggle about care. In the absence of
wider changes in the culture of manhood and the workplace, two-job
couples often suffer a microversion of the care deficit.

Cultural Responses: Traditional, Postmodern, Cold-modern,

and Warm-modern
To sum it up, the need for care is growing while the supply is de-
clining. While right-wing political forces are cutting off the public sup-
ply of care, women are moving into the workplace, and a speedup there
is straining the private sources of care. The present challenge, it seems
338 • Hochschild

to me, is to increase the supply of care, while retaining women's hard-

won gains in society and the workplace.
To pursue this goal, we must sensitize ourselves to various, compet-
ing cultural images of care, for it is in the persuasive power of these
images that an underlying struggle might be won. The couples I stud-
ied seemed to reflect four different images of care. For clarity, I shall
posit these images as Weberian ideal types, but the views of any one

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person are likely to be a blend of several. Moreover, I believe these
models are reflected in public discourse about social policy and thus
provide a tool for decoding that discourse. Each of the four models—
traditional, postmodern, cold-modern, and warm-modern—is a re-
sponse to the care deficit. Each competes with the others for cultural
space in both private and public discourse. Each raises different ques-
tions and places a different value on care.
The traditional solution is to retire women to the home where they
provide unpaid care. Traditional discourse centers on the topic of where
women should and should not be—caretaking is sometimes incidental
to the question of proper roles. Proponents include conservative reli-
gious figures and right-wing politicians, for this solution basically calls
for the wholesale reversal of industrialization and the "de-liberation"
of women. Because men are removed from the realm of care, and care
is retired to the devalued, pre-monetized realm, those who do care at
home (homemakers) become a "colony" within an ever more male,
modern state—which has the power to impose its cultural hegemony.12
The advantage of the traditional model to men is that women would
do the caring work and the care itself would be "personal." The dis-
advantage is that powerful long-term trends are moving in the oppo-
site direction and the vast majority of women would probably resist.
As the economy has grown and families have shrunk, more women
want to work outside the home, need the money, desire the security,
challenge, and community, and aspire to the identity provided by a
job.13 For women, the question is, "Do I really want to be a housewife?"
Even if so, in an era where 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, the
second question is, "Do I dare?"
In contrast to the traditional, the postmodern solution is to rid our-
selves of the image of mother-and-child, replace it with nothing, and
claim that everyone is happy anyway. In this scenario, we leave mat-
ters much as they are—with women in the labor force and men doing
little at home. We legitimate the care deficit by reducing the range of
ideas about what a child, wife, husband, aged parent, or home "really
needs" to thrive. Indeed, the words "thrive" and "happy" go out of
fashion, replaced by thinner, more restrictive notions of human well-
being. Popular psychology and advice books provide a fascinating
window on the postmodern solution. Most advice books for men con-
 Ideals of Care • 339

cern money and sex and say virtually nothing about caring for their
elderly parents or small children. Books for women, such as Helen
Gurley Brown's Having It All or Sonya Freeman's Smart Cookies Don't
Crumble, now also glamorize a life for women that is relatively free of
the burden of this care.
The culture has produced new images of childhood and old age that
pose the corresponding side of this picture. An Orwellian "superkid"

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language has emerged to normalize what commentators in the recent
past labeled as neglect. In a 1985 New York Times's article on new
programs for latchkey children, a child-care professional is quoted
making the case for the phrase "children in self-care" rather than
"latchkey children," a term coined during World War II when many
children (whose mothers were working in defense industries) went
home alone wearing a key to the house around their necks. "Children
in self-care" suggests that children are being cared for—but by them-
selves, independently (Hochschild 1989, 231). The recent popular
American film Home Alone portrays a boy around eight who is acci-
dentally left behind as his parents set off to a vacation in France. The
child breaks open his brother's piggy bank to buy himself frozen pizza
and fends off robbers—triumphing happily, independently, without
anyone's help.
A recent advice book, Teaching Your Child to be Home Alone, by
the psychotherapists Earl A. Grollman and Gerri L. Sweder, tells chil-
dren, "The end of the workday can be a difficult time for adults. It is
natural for them to sometimes be tired and irritable. . . . Before your
parents arrive at the Center, begin to get ready, and be prepared to say
good-bye to your friends so that pick-up time is easier for everybody"
(1993,14). Moreover, the psychotherapists advise children, "Don't go
to school early just because you don't like staying home alone. Teach-
ers are busy preparing for the day, and they are not expected to care
for youngsters until school officially begins" (1993,4). In another bro-
chure designed for parents who leave their children in "self-care," Work
and Family Directions, a nonprofit agency, presents a model "con-
tract"—like a legal document but framed in a lace design—to be signed
by parent and child concerning the terms of self-care.
The elderly, too, are increasingly portrayed as "content on their
own." An American television advertisement showed how the elderly
can "happily" live alone now in the company of a new portable elec-
tronic device that they can push to signal an ambulance service in case
they suffer a heart attack or fall. Like the term "children in self-care,"
the image of the "happy" older person also home alone is a disguise
of postmodern stoicism.
Pressed for time, many of the two-job couples I studied questioned
the need for various kinds of care. One husband said, "We don't really
340 • Hochschild

need a hot meal at night because we eat well at lunch." A mother ques-
tioned the meaning of cooking green vegetables when her son disliked
them. Yet another challenged the need for her children's daily baths or
clean clothes: "He loves his brown pants; why shouldn't he just wear
them for the week?" Understandable revisions of old-fashioned ideas of
"proper care," this line of questioning sometimes led to minimizing chil-
dren's emotional needs as well. The father of a three-month-old child in

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nine-hour day care said, "I want him to be independent." In the post-
modern model, these reductions raise no eyebrows.
In the public sector, too, some new practices fit the cold-modern
model. The current practice in many hospitals of sending new moth-
ers home the day after they give birth or sending patients home soon
after serious surgery is cold-modern. Eager to reduce costs, many in-
surance companies support ten-session psychotherapy instead of the
longer time such therapy would need to be truly helpful. Above all, the
failure of the American government to create a family policy that pro-
tects children and supports women is the ultimate expression of the
postmodern model.
Fearful that traditionalists will exploit people's distress in order to
return women to the home, some authors argue in part, "Stop feeling
a loss. Don't feel nostalgic for the intact homes of the 1950's. You'll
never get them back, and they weren't better anyway" (Coontz 1992;
Stacey 1990). This critique of nostalgia is needlessly confused, I think,
with an implicit postmodern message, "We can make do with less care
today."
The advantage of a postmodern solution is that it might seem easy
to implement. We only have to continue life as it often is, to make a
virtue of current necessity, and say, "I'm fine. I don't need care," or,
"They are fine. They don't need care." The crucial disadvantage of the
postmodern solution, of course, is that despite the wondrous variety
of cultural ideas about "needs," there is a core desire for care. Of the
four options, the postmodern requires the most vigorous emotional
effort to repress the wish to care or be cared for.
The postmodern model places the least value on care because the very
need for care is denied and the problem of making that need visible is
itself erased. Those who have to take care of unsuppressible needs
anyway come to feel angry and resentful at the invisibility of their task.
The sociological context—the care deficit—is culturally transformed
into a psychological issue: "Can I manage my emotional needs to match
the minimalist norms of care?"
The cold-modern solution is to institutionalize all forms of human
care. How much of a child's day or older person's life is to be spent in
institutional care is a matter of degree, but the cold-modern position
presses for maximum hours and institutional control. An example is
 Ideals of Care • 341

the Soviet model of 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. day care, with alternative
weeklong sleep-over child care available as well. The public debate
reflecting this position often centers on what means of care is the most
"practical, efficient, and rational," given the realities of modern life.
Advocates of the cold-modern ideal can be found among corpora-
tions that want to minimize the familial demands upon their workers
so as to maximize workers' devotion to the job. It also includes those

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managers and proprietors of day care centers, nursing homes, halfway
houses, and sick-care programs who want to expand their hours and
clientele. Some American companies have expanded day care hours for
"weekend workers" and have summer programs that keep children in
day care year-round. While such long hours are still uncommon for very
young children, Americans, and especially harried professionals and
managers, now "working scared" in the wake of layoffs, are tempted
to turn to cold-modern solutions.
According to the cold-modern scenario, an increasing amount of life
for both women and men goes on within the cash economy, with day
care and nursing homes, sick care, and meals-on-wheels programs for
invalids. Such programs are taking on more formerly private care. In
contrast to the postmodern solution, here we are invited to believe that
human beings need care. But in contrast to the traditional solution,
mainly public institutions provide that care. There is no "colony of
care" entrapping women at home. Men and women do not struggle
over who takes care of the children and the elderly or do much care
work at all. The tension point in this solution is between would-be and
actual providers of care. The basic question for parents who put their
children in day care and middle-aged people who put elderly parents
in senior citizen homes is: "How genuine or personal is institutional
care?"
There is a fourth, warm-modern model of care. It is modern because
public institutions have a part in the solution and warm because we
do not relinquish all care to them, and because men and women share
in what we do not relinquish. In contrast to the postmodern model,
notions of need are not reduced or denied, so caring is recognized as
important work. In contrast to the cold-modern solution, the warm-
modern model calls for fulfilling these needs, in part, personally.
Of the four models, the traditional turns to the past, the two
"moderns" turn toward the future, and the postmodern makes a vir-
tue of "grinning and bearing it" in the painful transition between the
two. Of the four, only the warm-modern ideal combines characteris-
tics of society that are both warm and modern. It does so by calling
for basic changes in both men and the structure of work. The warm-
modern model thus implies three arenas of struggle—male participa-
tion at home, time schedules in the workplace, and the value placed
342 • Hochschild

on care. While feminists are no less confused than others in their think-
ing about care, probably most of us advocate a warm-modern ideal,
however hard it is to achieve in reality.
Nations, as well as individuals, adopt cultural models of care. Faced
with a similar care deficit, developed nations have responded very dif-
ferently. Switzerland and Portugal have tended toward the traditional
model. The United States is moving steadily toward a synthesis of the

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post- and cold-modern models, while Sweden and Denmark still lead
the world in establishing a warm-modern model (Moen 1991).
What predisposes a society toward a warm-modern model of care?
On this we need further research, but three factors are key. The first
is an economy that depends on female labor: economic strength in
male-dominated industries and alternative sources of cheap labor in
female-dominated industries incline a society to retire affluent wom-
en to the home and establish the social desirability of this "alterna-
tive" for women. The second factor is a public culture of care: a cul-
ture of extreme individualism, such as that in the United States, may
legitimate individual rights, including the right to care, but discour-
ages collective efforts to help provide it. Third, the stronger and more
coordinated the warm-modern model's "interest groups," the better
its chances of winning.

Conclusion
Recent trends in the United States have expanded the need for care
while contracting the supply of it, creating a "care deficit" in both
private and public life. In the ongoing response to this crisis, I have
argued, we are engaging in a cultural politics. To try to clarify the terms
of that cultural debate, I have outlined four images of care—the tradi-
tional, postmodern, cold-modern, and warm-modern, in an effort to
clarify the cultural, and ultimately real, issues at stake.
How we think about care is increasingly a matter of moment. Now
armed with a majority in the U.S. Congress, increasingly popular con-
servative leaders such as Newt Gingrich are proposing to slash the
nation's welfare budget and reduce services to poor mothers, the dis-
abled, mentally ill, and the elderly. Gingrich's idea of "care" seems to
me to combine the worst and least feasible of the four models of care.
He proposed (though he has recently backed down) to place the chil-
dren of the destitute in orphanages. This is the cold-modern model.
Under the mantle of "family values," he proposes to place the care of
other children and older people in the hands of women at home. This
is the traditional model. The problem, of course, is that most orphan-
ages are "cold" and most women are in paid jobs.
In the end, each model implies a different view of the caregiver and
 Ideals of Care • 343

so implies a different emotional "trickle-down effect" to the cared-for.14

The more helpless a child or frail an older parent, the more keenly they
sense the extent to which they are a "burden." The cultural politics of
care touch the cared-for most of all. This is a politics, then, on behalf
of those most in need. Also at stake, of course, is the value placed on
gender equity.
In a warm-modern society, a government would not unload a host

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of social problems at the doorstep of housewives because that's not fair.
At the same time, men would share the care of children and the elder-
ly not simply because "it's fair" but because it's important.

NOTES
Many thanks to Adam Hochschild, Ann Swidler, and Sonya Michel for very
helpful comments on this essay. Thanks to Laurie Schaffner for excellent re-
search assistance. In addition, the idea of an increasing need and declining
supply of care developed from a conversation with Trudie Knijn.
1. Sometimes this is done by directly applying the same image to a new
context and sometimes by posing its negative opposite. Government agen-
cies and voluntary organizations, for example, often exhort citizens to give
to the needy by picturing a forlorn child alone in a public place, away from
a cozy lap. The picture of need shows nothing feminine, private, natural, or
well-functioning.
2. The four models I describe came out in bits and pieces in the interviews
with couples described in the Second Shift. In that work, I focus on family
dynamics, while in this essay, I focus on the public fate of these four ideals of
care.
3. In the developing world, the debt crisis since the 1970s and the rising
cost of imports and declining value of exports, in addition to the abiding prob-
lems of underdevelopment, have hurt whole populations. But most of the harm
passes down to the most vulnerable populations: migrants, refugees, and par-
ticularly women and children, among whom rates of sickness and death have
risen (Vickers 1991).
4. In Germany, the change in that period was smaller (from 2.1 to 1.4 per-
cent), as was true in France, England, Italy, and Denmark.
5. The proportion of older people has risen in most of Europe. In Sweden,
10 percent of the population was over 65 in 1950 and 18 percent in 1990. In
Canada and the United States, the gain was smaller (from 8 to about 12 per-
cent). Most other countries had rates of rise in between those two. To some
extent, the declining number of children needing care was replaced by a ris-
ing number of older people.
6. In Western Europe, the corresponding ratio is about one divorce for every
three or four marriages. Japan has had historically low divorce rates, but since
1960 divorce has been rising in Japan. Divorce statistics also understate the
social reality of dissolution, since separations and breakups among cohabit-
ing couples are not counted.
344 • Hochschild

7. In Denmark, a rate already high (17 percent in 1978) rose a bit more
(to 20 percent in 1988). Only in Japan, where the rate was initially low (6
percent in 1960), did the rate actually decline (to 5.9 percent in 1985).
8. In this period, the Swedish rate rose from 11 to 48 percent. In the Neth-
erlands, the increase was only from 1 to 9 percent, with Italy and Germany in
this more modest range. The rate is now highest in the United States, Denmark,
Sweden, France, and the United Kingdom.
9. In Sweden, 28 percent of Swedish children living with their divorced

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mothers had no contact with their fathers after the divorce.
10. The combined effect of job opportunities, declining fertility, and in-
creased economic need drew millions into the labor force, and a new model
of family life came to prevail—the two-job family. Worldwide, the number of
women in the paid labor force has doubled since 1950, and half of all women
aged 15 to 64 are now in the paid labor force. Indeed, in sixty-nine of the
eighty-eight countries for which there are data, the proportion of women in
the paid labor force grew significantly between 1960 and 1980 (Sivard 1985).
In all Western European and North American countries, the proportion of
women in paid work rose, though at different rates and with different end-
points. Fewer than half of working-age women worked in most developed
countries in 1970, but by 1988 in the vast majority of these countries, large
majorities of women worked—about 80 percent in Sweden and Denmark and
about two-thirds in the United States, Canada, England, and France. In 1988,
for mothers with children under the age of two, 86 percent of Swedish moth-
ers, 84 percent of Danish mothers, over half of French, Canadian, and U.S.
mothers, and roughly 40 percent of West German and Italian mothers were
in the labor force.
11. I drew an initial list of respondents from the personnel roster of a large
industrial firm and in this way was able to tap a range of occupations. Since
the response rate was lower among unskilled workers, I "snowballed" out to
neighbors and friends of the respondents on the original roster. See Hochschild
(1989).
12. In European countries such as the Netherlands, immigrant labor may
inhibit European women's full participation in the economy, partly predispos-
ing the society to a traditional or quasi-traditional solution (Knijn 1994).
13. Even if women were persuaded to stay home in an era of 50 percent
divorce, they would risk "getting caught" with no path to a good job)—and
be vulnerable to a life of insecurity and poverty. A "divorce culture," such as
that permeating much of the developed world, makes lifelong paid work the
wise choice for women. (The term "divorce culture" was coined by Karla
Hackstaff, Sociology Department, University of Northern Arizona.)
14. The lowest value on care we find is in the postmodern model, in which
care is seen as unnecessary because "we don't need it." The next to lowest value
we find is in the traditional model: caring for small children and the elderly is
honorable only for women, and the very low status of women is itself a state-
ment about the value placed on the work they do. Just above that is the cold-
modern model, which proposes upgrading public but not private care. The
highest value on care is found in the warm-modern model, which calls for
upgrading care in both the public and private realms.
 Ideals of Care • 345

For both the cold- and warm-modern models, the transfer of caring work
out of the home to the public realm is viewed as positive (they differ in how
much to transfer). But both modern models call for upgrading the status of
public caregivers. If day care workers or nursing home attendants were to
upgrade the value of their work, they would have to further "professionalize"
(Wilensky 1964). To do this, they need well-organized occupational groups
to establish control over accreditation, monitor the entrances and exits of peo-
ple from the field, and lobby for other measures to increase the public's ap-

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preciation for "emotional labor."
For advocates of the warm-modern model, there is another task—upgrad-
ing the value of care in the private realm (Abel and Nelson 1990; Sidel 1990).
As the kin system weakens, informal support for carers may wane. From whom
does a single mother get thanks for her work at home? Who supports a re-
married father for keeping in touch with children by his previous marriage?
Does a stepparent get recognized for taking good care of stepchildren or former
stepchildren? For the warm-modern model, these questions matter.

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