by Helma Lutz
Pluto Press
5/20/2025, paperback
SKU: 9780745345369
What is it like to care for another family, while yours remains in a different country? In today's capitalist society, migrant women performing care work in private households experience the painful tension of caring for both, often under precarious conditions.
Characterised as the 'backstage' family, the carer's remote relationship with their loved ones at home is often purely digital, with the double dilemmas of migrant motherhood and stay-behind fathers - exposing the pitfalls of transnational employment relations and the growth of social inequality.
Here, Helma Lutz explores the debates around this issue, focusing on carers from Eastern Europe working in the West. She unpacks questions around feminist critiques of capitalism and the commodification of emotional labour, exploring how gender justice and the search for socialist feminist utopias can shape how we see a future - not only for the improvement of the carers' working and living conditions but also for a new way of dealing with care work.
Reviews:
"A tour de force distillation of radical social thought on domestic labour grounded in critiques of global capitalism. This prodigiously researched book strikes a perfect balance between theory and empirics, examining the entanglement of migrant women's lives in former Socialist Republics as they shuttle between wage employment abroad and their homes" -- Heidi Gottfried, co-editor of Global Labor Migration: New Directions
"A powerful, systemic analysis of the outsourcing of care in Western Europe and the transnational social inequalities underpinning these processes. With remarkable precision and insight, Lutz brings the contemporary 'private' relations of care to the front stage of theory and debate on capitalism and society - emboldening us all to engage vigorously with the centrality of care" -- Isabel Shutes, Associate Professor, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science
About the Author:
Helma Lutz is a sociologist and Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. For many years she was the Acting Director of the Cornelia Goethe Centre for Women's and Gender Studies. She is the author of The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy; the co-editor with Kathy Davis of The Routledge International Handbook of Intersectionality Studies and with Brigitte Aulenbacher, Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck and Karin Schwiter the co-editor of Home Care for Sale: The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe. She lives in Amsterdam.