I recommend chapter 1, rather than the introduction, as the entry point for Gina Schouten’s new book. Chapter 1 provides, in a compressed but helpful way, a clear indication of the aims of and challenges to her argument. Its title includes the phrase “A Stalled Revolution,” which helps set the scene for Schouten’s ambitious project. She worries that, although more women have entered the paid workforce over the last few decades, and have done so with stronger credentials, this has not been accompanied by a corresponding decrease in their unpaid domestic (or caring) labor. The empirical evidence shows that women who live with men are doing more domestic work than are those men. The revolution in gender equality is thus stymied by the stubborn persistence of this gendered division of domestic labor. Schouten holds that this is a form of injustice and that it is harmful to men, women, and children. It deprives men of the benefits and pleasures that can accompany care work and contributes to intra-marital tensions. She contends, more generally, that it devalues the socially invaluable work of caregiving. Casting the gendered division of labor as a matter of justice leads Schouten to ask what the state can do to promote gender egalitarianism in the household. Her framework for thinking about legitimate government policy is Rawlsian political liberalism, with its emphasis on the values that citizens share regarding conceptions of the right. She invokes political liberalism’s ideals of reciprocity, mutual respect, mutual justifiability, equal citizenship, and legitimacy. In this way, Schouten implicitly joins those feminist interpreters of Rawls such as Sharon Lloyd, Stephen de Wijze, Amy Baehr, Martha Nussbaum, and Lori Watson and Christie Hartley, who see great promise in political liberalism. Schouten is admirably clear-sighted about the fact that not all citizens share the value of gender equality and that some might not even see a gendered division of labor as a question of justice or even as problematic in any respect. Still, she argues that, by appealing to a society’s shared values, the argument can be mounted that government action to equalize domestic labor is not only legitimate but necessary.
Such interventions include a paid family leave policy with job protection; government subsidies for substitute caregiving, such as high-quality day care for children and elder care options; and work-time regulation, in terms of hours worked per week and per year. These opportunities should be equally available to men as to women, because their aim is to erode the current situation where women are preponderantly the ones to take time out of the paid workforce for caring duties or to have their leisure time diminished by these activities. Schouten is clear that her suggested interventions do not exhaust the possibilities for achieving these goals and that the right mix of such policies varies with context. Policies like these would aim to make a gender-egalitarian sharing of paid and unpaid labor less costly than does the current arrangement and even to make the currently dominant gendered division of labor more costly than an egalitarian one. Such policies would tilt individual choices in the direction of gender egalitarianism.
Chapter 1 also includes the book’s first reference to Susan Moller Okin, who did pioneering work on this topic three decades ago. Schouten points out that many aspects of Okin’s analysis are as relevant now as they were then—which is more evidence of the stalled revolution. But it struck me as odd that the book’s 30-page introduction makes no reference to Okin as someone who had blazed Schouten’s trail. Chapter 1 then moves from Okin’s landmark work to acknowledge Arlie Hochschild’s complementary, contemporaneous work on the second shift (p. 40).
Schouten portrays the gendered division of labor as a universal phenomenon (p. 32), but her empirical evidence is drawn from western societies as far as I could see. Although her extensive bibliography lists some cross-national studies, the text draws on western examples only (see pp. 33–35, 207–9, 217–20). Her appeal to political liberalism as a way of addressing the gendered division of labor also limits the scope of her proposed solution, because not everyone lives in a polity with these organizing principles or shared conceptions of the right. But even within liberal societies, Schouten says little about possible variations in this phenomenon across differences of class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation: it cannot, for example, be a problem for same-sex couples by definition. I found her repeated appeals to “women” unqualified somewhat disconcerting. Schouten’s response to my concerns might be that the current regime is built on the obsolete assumption that paid workers have someone at home doing all, or more, of the unpaid caring work and that this disadvantages all workers who are not in that position, irrespective of their other characteristics (pp. 36–37).
Chapters 2 and 4 explore the problems that remaining within the confines of political liberalism might pose for Schouten’s advocacy. The neutrality requirement in particular would seem to proscribe her attempts to make a particular set of choices less costly than others. Chapter 2 clarifies that her position is consistent with justificatory neutrality but not neutrality of consequences, because, as she points out, all exercises of state power will be non-neutral in their consequences. Chapter 4 examines the fact that political liberalism’s principles of justice apply to the basic structure only but argues that this creates more room for gender-egalitarian policies that affect the family than many have realized. She contends that, regardless of individual behavior, the fact that the current basic structure effectively encourages an uneven distribution of paid and caring work makes it unjust. Of course, the location of the family in the basic structure has been a topic of feminist attention since the appearance of A Theory of Justice in 1971, but Schouten engages explicitly with very little of that literature.
One consistently impressive feature of Schouten’s densely packed book is the way she clearly and fairly articulates positions that diverge from hers. So although she is very obviously motivated by a particular agenda, she does not give short shrift to those who do not share her position. This admirable honesty and even-handedness are especially on display in the conclusion, where Schouten addresses the challenges of translating her philosophical argument into actual political debate.
