“A Substitute for You”: The Moral Meanings of Domestic Outsourcing

• In Event: 3132 - Family and Work

Abstract

Given families’ increasing work-family conflict, domestic outsourcing is on the rise across western industrialized countries. But not all families with sufficient resources hire housekeepers or nannies. Why not? We extend the literature on the gender division of domestic work and intimate labor by examining women’s beliefs about outsourcing housework and childcare. Using interviews with 109 middle-class employed mothers in Stockholm, Berlin, Rome, and Washington, D.C., we show that women’s decisions are shaped by moral frames about the perceived necessity of domestic outsourcing. These frames operate in the broader welfare state context of gendered cultural beliefs about parenting and available work-family policy supports. In Stockholm and Berlin, women used three moral frames mothers to explain why they didn’t hire caregivers and housekeepers: 1) children belong in childcare, not home with mothers or nannies, 2) capable parents care for their own homes, and 3) hiring a housekeeper is exploitative. In Rome and D.C. women used three moral frames to defend domestic outsourcing: 4) given poor daycare options, children benefit from nannies, 5) housekeepers reduce marital conflict, and 6) outsourcing allows women to pursue careers and “buy back time” with children. Mothers use these frames to navigate the tension between their lived experiences and prevailing expectations of motherhood. By doing so, women reflect and reinforce their welfare state’s family model. We argue that domestic outsourcing—and the frames some women use to justify them—deepens gender inequalities between mothers and fathers, and race and class inequalities between client families and domestic workers.

Authors

• Caitlyn Collins, Washington University in St. Louis

• Rachel Hellman, Washington University in St. Louis