From Publishers Weekly
The director of Cornell University's Feminism and Legal Theory Project, Fineman here imagines legal structures that put caregivers-parents, children of the elderly, spouses, partners or others-at the center of a web of recognitions and subsidies, a framework that works to "reconceptualize and transform our notions about the family and its relationship to the state and other social institutions." Fineman (The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies) seeks to change how society defines and supports families, traditional or otherwise. Fineman finds that in the U.S., "collective responsibility...is privatized through the institution of the family," and that U.S. domestic policy is oriented toward "the delivery of social goods only in the case of family default." This set-up has allowed, on the one hand, a kind of deregulation of social goods as delivered by corporations and other sources, and on the other, a relative lack of support for many kinds of caregiving relationships, including same-sex households and partnerships. Fineman argues that the U.S. must extend the shield of privacy, in its legal sense, around such caregiving relationships, and support all of them with a guaranteed set of rights and subsidies. Putting caregiving, rather than sexual affiliation, at the center of policy, would reflect a recognition that "merely being financially generous with our own mothers or... wives will not suffice to satisfy the share of societal debt we generally owe all caretakers." While non-scholars should be able to follow Fineman's use of jargon and legal precedents, her book is largely theoretical, and lacks the case studies, anecdotes and reportage that would make her ideas more immediate to lay readers. Anyone who calls for "the abolition of marriage as a legal category," as Fineman has done previously and does again here, is bound to raise hackles, but Fineman makes an interesting case.
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Americans have long celebrated the ideals of individualism and have favored privatization of essential social functions from welfare to education to imprisonment. But Fineman, a feminist and professor at Cornell Law School, posits a social vision of collective responsibility and dependency. She begins by exploring the myth of autonomy--and ideals of self-sufficiency--that drives so many policies and personal assumptions in American life. Fineman deconstructs those assumptions and examines human life from infancy through old age and the obvious ways that we are universally dependent. She then expands on the government and the market as institutions that are similarly depending on those who are generally dismissed and undervalued as caretakers. Contrary to market assumptions, caretakers provide an astonishing amount of the glue that permits self-absorbed notions of autonomy. In this fascinating feminist critique of American economics and politics, Fineman advocates policies that acknowledge dependency and promote equality in meeting social needs.
Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Hardcover
edition.
