Chris Clarke has an interesting post at Pandagon about how several quality-of-life movements depend on unpaid female labor. Even the “enlightened” ones, because what else is new?
Yes, death has been increasingly medicalized, but McKown isn’t exactly advocating de-medicalizing the process, just changing the venue. The problem isn’t that death has been medicalized — no one seriously advocates getting rid of doctors and nurses for aid during the process — but that it has been corporatized, like so many other facets of life. We get sick enough to die, and then the course of what’s left of our lives is lived out in impersonal surroundings, our needs attended to by strangers — skilled strangers, true, but dispassionate nonetheless, our decisions circumscribed by HMO policy and procedures driven by monetary concerns of either the cost-cutting or ass-covering varieties.
But when parts of our lives get corporatized, it’s generally the case that the associated relationships get monetized. In English: suddenly we find ourselves paying someone for labor we once got for free.
Or, as Ron Sullivan put it a couple years back, reminiscing about the good ol’ days:
Remember how it felt when you realized those nice gentle brothers still thought you were a household appliance? The only household appliance they weren’t ready to give up when they went all wholegrain and groovily off-the-grid?
Well I do.
I have to say, this hit home for me.
My father dropped dead in August 1995 (a day before Jerry Garcia, which became an issue a month later at my brother’s wedding, when my family was admonished not to upset the bride’s sister because she was in mourning. From a family who didn’t even so much as mention my father’s passing less than a month before). So, you know, long-term care issues weren’t on the radar.
But then, my mother had a heart attack in 2002 (one she didn’t recognize as such, not being the classic male-identified symptoms). And, well, while we didn’t really know what was going on, there was discussion amongst my siblings about What To Do.
And, you know? My brothers (all four of them) acted as if the choice was between my sister and I to take care of her. My sister was actually in a better place than any of us to take care of her given that her husband was in the Marines, they were about to get sent from Hawaii to Virginia anyhow, and Mom could become a dependent and get all the attendant benefits. Plus, she had the grandchildren around for Mom.
Yet, somehow, because I was the other daughter, and because I was the closest geographically (Mom lived in a subdivision in North Jersey off I-80 with an express bus to NYC), the talk turned to me as caretaker. Because of course a single woman with a full-time job and crushing student debts and a one-bedroom apartment is the PERFECT fucking choice as caretaker to a woman with a damaged heart.
This was pushed, incidentally, by the sister-in-law who had spent a lot of time positioning herself as Mary Ann’s Best Daughter in order to get her hands on at least some of the good china.
Of course, this is nothing new. Time was, the youngest daughter remained unmarried and essentially became a domestic servant. Happened to my Aunt Martha (she did try to join the convent like her twin sister, but she just didn’t feel the calling), and my Great-Aunt Julia, and my friend Terri’s mother’s sister (whose name I don’t remember, but who was not only brought over from the Philippines to raise Terri and her siblings, but once they were grown, to help raise Terri’s kids).
Chris also mentions the Slow Food movement as yet another way to guilt women into providing unpaid labor in the name of authenticity. Can’t say I disagree.