The Concept of Care

I first encountered Joan Tronto's book Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care when I was in graduate school. The text, published in 1994, was an assigned reading for an American Studies course on the politics of knowledge. I read the book in 1997 when I was in my mid-thirties and in a phase of my life where I have to admit that I did not care for much of anything or anyone. I was angry at how I perceived the workplace and its presumptive pursuit of happiness had duped me, and I felt that society had let me down, too. I wanted to lash back and get even, but I wasn't really sure who or what the enemy was.

As a result, an idea that "care" could create a richer, more fulfilling world for everyone didn't particularly go over well with me. Some people didn't deserve care, I found myself muttering to myself. And nobody cares about me. Why should I extend care for others?

Flash forward a decade. I am teaching classes in Political Science as an adjunct instructor at a community college. I am a liberal Democrat; most of my students are not. It feels -- in this post-9/11, high-Bush, not yet age of Obama -- as if the future is bleak. The students care more about saving souls (via Jesus and the conservative politics of mega-churches) than they do about showing compassion for their others -- particularly those who are poor, of color, and reside in lower-income urban communities. As a sort of wild experiment, I pick up Tronto's idea of an ethic of care and divide the class into two groups: one is to simulate the role of a pro-choice organization; the other is to play the role of anti-abortionists. Together the groups must create a satisfactory resolution that supports a single teenage woman who has become pregnant.

Weirdly, it works. By deploying the idea that being cared for will help the young woman be a better giver of care to her future child, the two groups reach a consensus that averts an abortion yet provides the woman intellectual, emotional, and financial support to care for her future child and for herself properly. The students agree that the woman's career need not be sacrificed, and that the woman should be given the means to attend college. They come up with realistic solutions to education, child care, nutrition, and career development.

If only public policy could be so easy.

The ethic of care returned to my mind last summer as I was working with a colleague to develop our Poetics of Sustainability project. In the midst of the project's development, we met a third colleague who was affiliated with a center different from ours but within the same college who was looking at our work of mentoring (advising and supporting students through their college careers) as emotional labor. As the colleague articulated her understanding of emotional labor, I began to see how an ethics of care could make sense. If the mentors did not receive adequate care, they would use up their care reserves and would not be able to care for more than 25 to 30 students in a single shot. Reading between the lines of my colleagues' research, I realized that this perhaps was already occurring as workloads for mentors were increasing without any appreciable acknowledgement or in pay. My colleague on the Poetics of Sustainability project showed with her words that she was an actual case-in-case. With nearly two hundred mentees and responsibilities to take incoming calls from hundreds of others two or three days a week, she had virtually no time for herself.

The ethic of care stayed in my mind over the past year as I worked with my initial partner and, over time, three other individuals to make the plan to create workshops around personal sustainability a reality. When we finally hosted the five workshops we were able to organize -- all in the month of April -- I was amazed. The workshops engaged participants with deep breathing, meditative drawing, and reading and writing poetry, and participants responded with joy and ease. I, too, played a role in many of the workshops as a participant-observer, and was amazed by the lightness and sense of good feeling that the workshops left me with.

Looking back on what worked, I realize that the ethic of care was at work. It allowed us to participate in creativity, even as we were teaching it. In doing so, it helped us let go of old monsters and fears of the past, to build something entirely new.